Katabasis: Descent into the Underworld
As the nights lengthen into Autumn, we continue our exploration of the spiritual cosmos. We have descended, to the threshold of the underworld, the dark and shadowy world of the dead, the ancestors, of the chthonic spirits and deities, the roots of the world tree, behind and beyond and underlying our physical realm. This realm has been described in nearly every mythology in the world. It is not a physical place, though countless places in our physical world are seen to be portals of entry into its shadowy depths. In reality, it is a place out of space and time.
We have discussed the dual aspect of the deities of agriculture, that they are simultaneously the gods and goddesses of the soil and the underworld beneath it, of fertility and death alike. All things planted in the dark earth must die and rise again to the light, pass into the kingdom of Hades to decay and be renewed in the growth of the new season. “Except as a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”, say the scriptures. This is the ancient realization of the first planters, the mystical meaning of the cycle of planting and harvesting, the seed is sown, it dies, losing its form and individuality, becoming a sprout, which endures the snows and cold of winter, and begins to grow when the land thaws in the spring, lengthening days of sunshine drawing the stalks of wheat ever higher, the grain forming in the ears, the green fading, the sap withering, senescence, drying, the reapers come and cut it down, it is brought to the threshing floor and flailed mercilessly, the chaff is winnowed and the crop is cleaned, ready to give life and to die again as it is sown in the next crop. Persephone, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, the slain and risen. John Barleycorn must die. The never ending cycle of earthly life, the wheel of necessity. Birth following death, Death following birth, as certain as the sun and the tides. The individual endures for a time, bears fruit, withers and dries up and is cut down by the reaper in the endless cycle, the soul, taken down to the underworld, drinks from the river of forgetfulness, and is sent back, again and again for purification. Life endures, the spirit, but the forms are in constant flux. Being, becoming and back to being. The relentless rolling of the wheel. We have been here many, many times, and will return many more.
This assurance of eternal life in the grand flux of existence was probably the secret of the mysteries of Eleusis, although revealed after days of fasting and a dramatic night time ritual, which probably involved the consumption of entheogenic plants. Those of us who are modern epoptae or mystai, who have had our eyes opened to the mysteries revealed by such substances, will understand that the actual mystical understanding of such revelations in their felt sense, is a truth far beyond the ability of mere words to convey. We are assured, in no uncertain terms, of the continuum of the life of the spirit on both sides of the great divide.
What is our relationship, as the living, to this cycle and to those who have gone before. Where are they and whether it is possible to contact them, and can we still help one another across the veil, these are a few of the questions we will discuss in this chapter and the next, starting first from mythology and folklore, with a bit of metaphysics and then move to the historical, magical, and religious traditions for practical advice on how to proceed to work with ancestors, and the dead, for magic and healing. We will try to tease out the boundaries of these categories, as well as sketch out the geography of their realms. I will also include a few anecdotes of my own humble experiences of what I believe to be contact with these forces from the other side, as well as some practices I have experimented with for connecting with ancestors and other entities.
As cunning farmers, we are most concerned with underworld folklore as it relates to the land and our life on it. Many cultures have relevant traditions of spiritual beings residing in or under the land, the Sidhe of the Celtic nations, more properly known as the Aes Sidhe, literally meaning “people of the mounds”, the entities associated with the Neolithic burial mounds found in abundance in Western Europe. The actual relationship of the Fae, as they are also known, to the human cultures who built the mounds and once buried their dead in them is unknown, but what is interesting is that it seems like the long dead can actually become land spirits, dwelling in or under the land as guardians or even trickster figures. As noted in Chapter Two, North America also has its own “people of the mounds”, who have passed out of the memory by their present day descendants, and who perhaps bear a similar relationship to them as do the modern inhabitants of the Celtic nations do to the builders of their mounds. But are their spirits still there? Can they still be felt by the sensitive and honored by propitiations and offerings? It seems like we can make a distinction regarding land spirits, between the once human and the never human. The European Fae seem to partake of both classes of entities in the folklore.
We are attempting here to sift through the historical primary sources and academic literature to extract hints to relevant authentic practice that fits our life and situation here on the land. Anthropological and other academic literature gives us an outsider’s view, an etic perspective, as practitioners we are interested in gnosis, intimate knowledge, an emic perspective. We seek the living reality beyond the physical that all humans have access to, one that can be accessed by techniques of consciousness expansion that usually fall into the realm of magic and mysticism. That is the reason for the seeming unity of spiritual traditions across history and the place. Spiritual reality is one and ineffable, and can only be approached through myth, symbol, ritual, and higher states of consciousness. Practitioners of technologies of the sacred everywhere and in all times have achieved contact with the fundamental realities of existence itself, and filtered them through their particular cultural frameworks and unique individual perspectives. This explains both the unity and the diversity of approaches to the sacred, the trick for us as modern explorers of these territories is to sort out what is relevant and necessary for us as individual practitioners. We have a guide in the inner voice of the daimon that is with us as an advisor throughout our lives, we need only to learn how to listen.
An intuition came to me as I walked on the land one night, that some people, when they leave this life, stay in the land, as spirits, due to attachment, or even love for the place where they live. That this is maybe a different class of ghosts from the ones who are attached to their places from anger or passion, this type seems more of a guardian. And, the longer they stay, human lifetime after human lifetime, watching the living come and go, the less individual they become, becoming less and less human with each passing year, and becoming more and more like something like the fae, weird and ethereal, shades, becoming more powerful with age, almost semi divine. Their existence, maybe, is something like the shades in Sheol or Hades, or one of the conceptions of the afterlife from the ancient world, a dark, infernal cavernous place, a realm shaped by the imaginings of those who had gone before and by the land above.
Our ancestors are with us always, whether we knew them or not, they gave us the forms and qualities of our mortal existence, they shape our thoughts and feelings from outside of space and time. Their experiences shape our consciousness and that of our descendents and our communities. They are not shadowy ghosts, shady forms and apparitions, eidola, although sometimes they can be experienced that way. I want to get across here the intimacy with which our ancestors interact with us, they no longer have bodies, are no longer tied to space and time, we are their bodies and we host their consciousness. Many healing traditions speak of energetic attachments, whereby a spiritual entity attaches itself to a person and feeds from their essence. I would venture to say that this in more common than we think, that we all have attachments to our ancestors, and if we begin to consciously feed them, consciously attempt to send them healing, to give cult, as the ancients would say, that we can begin to heal the wounds of the past. Many of us suffered pain and suffering at the hands of those now dead, and the wounds are too fresh, too recent, and healing and forgiveness is sometimes not even desired by the living. The trick here is to go back further, back into the past, to a more generalized sense of ancestry.
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