Many of us feel strongly unease with darkness, others have a real phobia of darkness and only thinking about that terrorizes them and causes them real panic attacks.
It is a fact that each one of us often experiences unpleasant feelings when we get in touch with darkness. This discomfort appears when we’re just infants, and it is not uncommon for that to remain in our adulthood.
It is a kind of ancestral fear that our species has dragged on forever, just think about the fact that, quite always, darkness is associated with negative, malicious and sinful things.
Dante Alighieri himself, at the beginning of his journey through Hell, finds himself in a "Dark Forest", which certainly does not presume anything good.
On a psychological level, more than fearing darkness itself, we have fear of not seeing what it can conceal and of the dangers that can be hidden in it.
Likewise, we are afraid of our own darkness, that part of personality that is concealed and we don’t even want to know.
But is totally suppressing our dark side really wise?
In fact, taking on and accepting our obscurity can make us more mature and helps us to take control of ourselves.
Many of those who work with subtle energies in occultism tend to eliminate from their experiences and existences all the things that concerns “negativity”, entities which are not exactly crystal clear, and actions that are not good.
But if we want to understand deeply Magic, we must consider both good and bad energies. Once approached paganism, many people work only with the power of love and light, but being a Witch is not just all about crystals, yoga, vegan dinners and flowers everywhere.
Darkness do exists, whether we like it or not, and ignoring its existence will only increase its size.
Obviously, I am not saying that working with positive energies is wrong, it is all very praiseworthy and karmic. What I really mean is that without having made peace with our darkness, without facing it with every fiber of our being and deeply understood, the light we will work with will be very weak and our soul will never develop, nor it won’t mature.
The true light, the one that stands out, dazzling and powerful, the light of truth and knowledge can be obtained only after having descended one by one the steps leading to the underworld of our unconscious. The one who talks about love and light must have lived the darkness on his own skin before.
Without Darkness, Light would not be visible.
In Alchemy, the first stage of transformation of “the Great Work” is the Nigredo (which means literally Darkness), where all the ingredients pass through a state of decomposition and putrefaction, they face the true "death" and then they transform theirself and evolve into something pure, until you get to the "philosopher's stone". Even in this case, then, the very nature of things makes us realize that there is no evolution without first having to deal with Darkness.
“Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.” C.G. Jung
Literature is full of legends, characters and archetypes that face the journey of the soul based on this kind of reasoning, the so-called "Catabasis": The Goddess Ishtar / Inanna, Orpheus, Persephone, etc.
Let us take as example Goddess Ishtar / Inanna.
The myth tells the descent into the underworld of Ishtar, goddess of love and fertility, in order to pay homage to his sister Ereshkigal, Goddess of the Underworld, recently widowed.
Ishtar knocks at the door of the underworld, threatening that if they won’t let her in, she would let the Kurnugi (the souls of the dead) escape and devour the living, subverting the actual order of the world. The guardians let her in, she make it through the seven doors, and they remove her garments, her amulets and her magical powers (Called “Me”) at every passage, making Ishtar completely naked and helpless before Ereshkigal. This one, orders her minister, Namtar, the God of fate, to cast against her sister illnesses that would affect her entire body, inprisoning her. Ishtar's body was beaten and humiliated, and the corpse was hung on a hook. However, Ishtar, aware of the great risk of crossing the Irkalla kingdom, warned his faithful handmaid Ninshubur, telling her that if she had not seen her returning within a short time she should have ask for help.
Ninshubur then asked for help to the gods and the God Enki answered; He created from earth two androgynous creatures similar to flies, called Kurgarra and Galatur, and ordered them to descend into the underworld. They passed the seven gates without being noticed by the servants of the underworld, when they came near the Goddess, they heard her sobbing because she had left herself abandoned and went to console her. Ereshkigal then decided to give them a gift, Kurgarra and Galatur asked then to have the corpse of Ishtar and they obtained it. They sprinkled it with the nectar of life and her eyes opened. At that point Ishtar wanted to leave, but the ghostly demons, creeping creatures who lived in the underworld, stopped her and told her that she should have taken someone else to replace her. They escorted her to Earth, to Uruk, where Ishtar found her husband Dumuzi (Tammuz) dressed in golden garments sitting on her throne, totally not worried about the disappearance of the Goddess, who, full of rage, allowed therefore the demon Galla to bring him to Irkalla.
Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, grieve over knowing that her brother would be forever in the afterlife, then Ishtar, who was very much attached to both of them, took pity of her and let her go down to exchange herself with her brother; doing so Dumuzi, god of vegetation and pastures, for the first six months of the year ought to remain in the netherworld with Ereshkigal, then he had to exchange with his sister and return on earth. In this way, in the six months that Dumuzi would be absent from the earth, the vegetation would become unhappy and winter would come, except recover vitality when he would return, bringing spring and fertility, regulating in this way the seasonal cycle.
In this case, Ishtar, in order to achieve equilibrium and completeness, get prepared, in a painless way, to face its dark side; as Ereshkigal is nothing other than the mirrored image, the shadow of Ishtar.
At the same time, Ishtar and Ereshkigal together form a single female archetype, in which we find a bipolarity: above and below, light and shadow, the two faces of the moon, the goddess full of love and the blood thirsty beast.
In paganism, in general, in addition to the classic figure of the benevolent and love dispensing Mother Goddess, there is a complementary figure that is the so-called Dark Goddess.
They aren’t actually two different figures, but two aspects, two different faces of the same divine archetype.
Opposed to the Mother Goddess, we find a perspective of a devouring Mother, a terrible entity that destroys and devours everything but, at the same time, leads the male deity into transformation and evolution.
We are talking about a Goddess which represents the night, the moon, darkness, war, illness and death, and at the same time is strongly interconnected with the sun, life, light, because these things cannot exist without the Goddess. As in the human being we’ve got alongside lights and shadows, so it is in the Goddess. They are two complementary archetypes of the same entity.
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| Ereshkigal/Lilith, British Museum, London. |
Ereshkigal is the most impressive example of Dark Goddess; her name means "Lady of the Great Place Beneath."
Born as goddess of grain and cereals, Daughter of Sin, older sister of Ishtar and Shamash, she was called Ninlil and she was Enlil’s wife, the god of heaven. Ninlil was repeatedly raped by her husband under various disguises. Because of this, was punished by the gods by sending him into the underground world. By the consent of his consort, Ninlil followed him to the underworld where she assumed the name of Ereshkigal, became the dark goddess and gave birth to god Nannasin, the god of the moon.
Ereshkigal is the impulse force, the primordial anger, instinctivity, the feral part of the female soul.
She represents the feminine archetype of the cycle of nature, which despite being buried, canceled, still succeeds in sprouting and giving new fruits; She is the certainty of life after death.
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