by Connie Zweig
How do you deny the call to descend? What are the consequences of disobeying the voice? What do you imagine will happen if you go down into the underworld of your own soul?
THE CALL OF THE SELF: INANNA’S STORY
For others, the descent may begin with a parent’s death, an initiatory process that cannot be avoided. Or the descent may be inaugurated by a Beloved’s death, which has a finality that feels impossible to accept. And the lover is suddenly thrown into bereavement like Orpheus, who follows his Beloved Eurydice into the underworld. Or the descent may come suddenly through an encounter with violence, which burns through our ideals and hopes. If the loss is shattering enough or the disillusionment deep enough, the call may be heard. If we turn toward it and listen, eventually we may obey and discover what the call asks of us.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the descent as a perilous journey into the dark, crooked lanes of our own spiritual labyrinth. There we find a landscape of symbolic figures, which is frightening and marvelous. Campbell likens the mythological descent to the second stage of the classical spiritual way of mystics, which involves a purification of the senses, a humbling of the ego, and a concentration of the attention. In psychological terms, he says, the descent involves transforming the infantile images of our personal past. So, the descent to the underworld is both a psychological awakening and a spiritual initiation.
And at every stage, the encounter with the shadow is an initiatory step. This psychic movement inward and downward, toward the deep darkness, is like entering a holy place, which requires metamorphosis. We cannot bring the persona, which is adapted to the upper world, into the underworld. We shed it as a snake sheds its old skin. And this act of symbolic death brings new life, the birth of the Self.
The theme of the inner traveler’s ego death and spiritual rebirth, which takes place at the bottom of the abyss, or in the world womb, is repeated over and over in human history. In traditional cultures, the shaman undergoes a rite of passage in which he descends and returns with gifts. In mythology, the Greek maiden Persephone is raped by Hades, lord of the Underworld, but makes a seasonal return to the realm above, bringing springtime with her. The Egyptian Osiris is slain, dismembered, and scattered over the sea, only to return from the dead. And Christ is hung on the cross and left to die, only to be resurrected. In the same way, each man or woman who makes the harrowing descent and suffers the required sacrifices engages in a life-renewing act.
In the oldest recorded account of the passage through the gates of metamorphosis, which comes from the land of Sumer near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, made an arduous journey to the underworld. It describes many of the key psychological and spiritual aspects of the midlife journey.
First, Inanna leaves her family and all that is comfortable and familiar. Then as she approaches each gate to the underworld, she gives up a precious attribute: her role as queen, her royal power, her sexual power, each symbolized by an adornment such as a crown, a necklace, a breastplate, a gold ring, and a royal robe. In her nakedness, her powers removed, Inanna is as helpless as an infant.
At last, she meets face-to-face with her dark sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, who eats clay, drinks dirty water, and has no props to protect her from her own instinctual nature. Ereshkigal carries primal affect—rage, greed, suffering—and, like the Hindu goddess Kali, she devours and destroys things, thereby bringing about gestation and the possibility of new life. On seeing Inanna, the fertile, beautiful goddess of love, Ereshkigal rages with jealousy and turns her sister into a corpse that is hung from a hook on the wall, as if in a crucifixion.
Inanna’s mythological meeting with her shadow sister, her loath-some alter ego, inspires terror and submission. She confronts the death-dealing, rageful indifference of the one who sits on a throne within each of us in the most hidden recesses of the inner world. As a result, she turns into dead meat—lifeless, formless, hopeless—symbolic, perhaps, of how we feel in the paralysis of midlife depression.
Together, Inanna and Ereshkigal represent one goddess in her two aspects: light and dark. The meeting of these two, which often occurs in dramatic ways at midlife, is an archetypal event. As Jungian analyst Sylvia Perera says, when we connect the upperworld Self with the underworld shadow, we suffer the death of the ego-ideal. In meeting the horrific beast, we are forced to put aside pride, virtue, and beauty. We swallow up or are swallowed up by our opposite. In this alchemical process, rebirth occurs.
The lowest point of the labyrinth, where the confrontation with evil takes place, proves to be the place of reversal. Poet Kathleen Raine describes Dante’s famous descent and return in this way:
The journey had been, hitherto, always a descent into darker and worse places, the claustrophobia closing in until Hell’s ruler is encountered and identified as the Shadow.… Now that the ruler of hell has been seen and identified, Virgil half leads, half carries the horrified Dante through a narrow passage under Satan’s throne, below the hairy thighs of the half-animal, half-human figure of the Devil. What takes place is a kind of rebirth through a round opening; and, like the newborn, Dante can now for the first time see the sky and the stars. And there is literally—and how dramatically—a change of point of view. Satan on his towering throne is now seen reversed beneath the traveler’s feet: his power is gone. He is no longer the ruler and the center of the psyche. What has taken place Jung described as the reintegration of the personality when we find the Self—the “other” within us—and not, as we had supposed, the ego, to be the ruler and center of the soul.
If you have made a descent, who did you find at the bottom of the abyss? What was the nature of your dismemberment? What permitted your rebirth?
THE CHANGING OF THE GODS: REIMAGINING MIDLIFE DEPRESSION
Like the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, the changing of the gods in the palace of the psyche is a symbolic shift in power—but it may have vital consequences. An unknown archetype may steal the seat of power swiftly and radically alter our self-presentation, bringing disorientation in its wake. For example, an Athena woman, who is typically independent and intellectual, may become seduced into her Aphrodite nature, turning her carefully crafted career upside down. Or a Hestia woman, who keeps order inside a closed home, may be pushed outdoors by the winds of change, such as a financial crisis, and find herself tossed about by seemingly impossible new challenges. Or a Hera woman may face the death of a spouse so that her stable identity as wife unexpectedly disappears. Or a menopausal woman, freed of the social bounds of fertility and motherly duties, may meet Baubo, the bold older woman who displays her sexuality in a statement of freedom.
A Zeus-style husband, master of his universe, may have a heart attack that leaves him dependent and out of control. Or an Apollo man may have a mystical experience that challenges his rational, well-ordered universe and sends him off on a spiritual quest. Or Hades may suddenly surface in a midlife depression and push aside Eros, our connection to life and love, making us feel low, cold, and withdrawn.
For some people, the movement between the archetypes is fluid and ever-changing. They can face the separations, grieve the losses, and cross over, letting go of old baggage and beginning anew. But for others, the crossing is difficult, painful, overwhelming. It’s as if they cannot let go of one trapeze to withstand the emptiness for a moment before catching the next. They need nets, reassurances, guarantees.
Perhaps some midlife depression results when we cannot face the death of the old and get stuck in between worlds, motionless, unable to reach the other side where new life begins. Time stops; the moment seems to drag on forever. Winter, cold and relentless, does not give way to spring.
However difficult, these moments of underworld winter can open out into great depth. They can bring time for incubation, for the imagination to deepen by envisioning yet greater depths. For the underworld is always with us, simultaneous and continuous with the upper world, offering us the depth
s in any moment. And they can bring time for gestation, an opportunity to give birth to a new life.
A midlife depression, then, with its great sacrifices and great awakenings, has the potential to help us live in those moments of depth more fully. It can show us that we were living with only one eye open—the eye of light. Now, whenever possible, we can open the eye of darkness, and our vision can embrace a deeper, wider, more paradoxical range of life.
Who is summoning you at midlife? Who is retreating from the seat of power?
BODILY SYMPTOMS AS SHADOW SPEAKING
At midlife the shadow also speaks to us in the body’s language. Insomnia, allergies, headaches, back pains, multiple drug dependencies—all tell us that the ego’s illusion of control is just that, an illusion. Hot sweats, mood swings, sexual impotence, hair loss, memory loss, hearing loss—naming our afflictions begins to sound like the curses of Job, who is stripped of his attachments, one by one. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart attacks, degenerative diseases—all tell us that we are mortal.
In a Korean Zen tale, a prince notices two red, painful spots on his thigh one morning. Assuming they are insect bites, he has his silk sheets burned and goes about his business. But later that night he notices that the two bumps have turned into a pair of furiously darting eyes. When he wakes up, they are accompanied by a pair of flaring nostrils. Terrified, the prince binds his leg to cover his affliction and ignores the sounds of breathing that begin to arise from his thigh.
Later that night, he clamps his hand over his leg and nearly loses two fingers: The symptom has grown a mouth. With this event, he summons the court surgeon to cut away the face. For several months, life returns to normal. Then one day, while he is on his horse, a scream erupts from his leg: The symptom has returned with a vengeance. And rumors fly that the prince is possessed by demons.
When a wandering monk tells the prince of a sacred stream that is protected by Kwan-yin, goddess of compassion, whose miraculous waters heal all wounds, he eagerly journeys there. As he is about to pour the holy water onto the hated face to silence it forever, the mouth cries out: “All this time, you have never even looked at me or tried to understand a single word I have said. Do you not recognize me?”
The prince, gazing closely, suddenly recognizes a distorted likeness of his own face and begins to weep. As he does so, the eyes on his leg soften, melting into those of Kwan-yin herself. “You had no heart of compassion,” she says. “No sword of self-insight. How else could I summon you to your true nature?” And the prince and the goddess speak into the night about the secret suffering that had disturbed the prince’s sleep long before the face appeared. When the sun comes up, the prince is healed.
Perhaps our secret sufferings make us sick. Our private shames and silenced sorrows may descend into our bodies, lodging in our muscles and nerves, our blood and bones, perhaps even trapped in our tiny cells, the building blocks of our physical world. There they rest in deadly silence, banished into darkness, only to erupt decades later as a pernicious cancer, a blocked artery, a tidal wave of anxiety, or a mysterious, undiagnosed chronic pain. In our symptoms our shadows take on substance.
Today it’s common knowledge that the mind cannot be separated from the body, distilled out like salt from seawater. Each mental event, whether sorrow or ecstasy, has physical and chemical correlates. Each bodily event, whether a pregnancy or a common cold, has its corresponding state of consciousness in the brain. In effect, the mind is in the body, or so say psychoneuroimmunologists, who scramble to discover the proper set of attitudes to extend a cancer patient’s chances for survival. And the body is in the mind, or so say psychiatrists, who scramble to discover the proper set of chemicals to ease our mental suffering.
In other words, emotional shadows—pessimism, cynicism, depression, aggression—have physical correlates. While one does not cause the other in a simple, linear way, it is clear that they are coterminous, sharing one boundary. Therefore, to some extent, shadow-work can be done via the mind or via the body. For example, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman uses images, movement, breath, and sounds to approach the shadow through the body, a road less traveled than the mind’s symbolic route. And Arnie Mindell, founder of process work, uses a shamanic approach to amplify the symptom, advising patients to focus intently on their pain until something new emerges—a voice, a movement, a sound, a story. In this way, a creative, perhaps healing process may be initiated when the archetypal image and the buried emotion are linked more consciously. Once again, the goal is not a cure, but an encounter with the mystery.
James Hillman suggests that instead of dreading or despising our symptoms, whether psychological or physiological, we owe them a great debt: They tell us that we can never take back into our ownership the events caused by our complexes. Our symptoms refuse to submit to our ego’s view of ourselves as a unified person. Instead, in their stubborn autonomy, they insist on voices of their own. By suffering our symptoms, Hillman proposes, by moving through our pathologies to find depth and meaning, we descend to soul.
In this way, we come to our own understanding of Jung’s famous statement: “The gods have become diseases.” That is, we imagine in our heightened rationality that we have left behind the archaic gods; however, we are as much possessed by the archetypes today as ever. Like Kwan-yin, they simply go by different names.
Which midlife symptoms speak to you of shadow? If you were to do shadow-work via the body, what gold might you find?
RECLAIMING THE UNLIVED LIFE: THE RESURRECTION OF LOST GODS
At the end, we return to the beginning. The cry of the banished soul, hidden in the cellar of childhood, can no longer be silenced. Taboo traits and forbidden feelings resurface as fully formed shadow characters who pound their fists on the table, demanding to be heard. If we turn our backs on them and deny their needs, the kingdom falls into the hands of a tyrant or a victim, or it disintegrates into chaos. Either way, the precious gold in the dark side remains concealed.
If instead we heed the call of the Self rather than deny it, obey the Self rather than debate it, then midlife crisis becomes an opportunity: We can begin to reclaim the unlived life. We can unearth the gold long buried in the depths of our souls.
And with ongoing shadow-work we can halt the transmission of intergenerational family sins. We can learn to risk expressing our feelings with authenticity, shadow-dance with our partners, work shorter hours to spend time with family or on spiritual or creative pursuits, and respect the autonomy of our children’s souls. In these ways, we give our children a new legacy of hope.
At forty-three, our client Andrew, a father’s son with few friends or creative passions, faced his worst demon: dependency. At midlife, soon after he married Annette, who worked as a designer, he received a job offer out of town, which they decided to accept. So they suddenly shifted from a two-income to a one-income family, with Annette becoming financially dependent on Andrew for the first time. His terror of her powerlessness and dependency on him brought up the following story.
As a young boy, Andrew adored his dad, a career military man who overpowered him, saying, “I’m bigger than you, so do what I say,” and shamed him for having any needs, including financial support. Having identified early with his father’s heroic ways, the boy dreamed of becoming a policeman or a soldier. His persona became brusque and aloof and his passions competitive, as his father urged him to stay focused, perform well, and beat others at any cost. This performance pressure became so much a part of his personality that he did not know it was a shadow character; however, every success became a success for this senex-tyrant, who protected the parent and made certain that the dependent child, so small in the face of the giant, had no room to breathe.
But when Andrew was nine, his father deserted the family, telling his young son, “You’re on your own. Take care of yourself now.” Like his dad, Andrew made a necessary Faustian bargain: He developed a hostile kind of autonomy, denying his own feelings of dependency and powerlessness a
nd denying his playfulness as well. Since then, he needed no one, and no one needed him.
So, when his independent wife, who also hid her own neediness, suddenly depended on him, this intolerable shadow quality evoked panic. He began to tell her that she should find a job—and do it now. He began to treat her as his father had treated him—with dogmatic impatience for her own needs and rhythms. He could not tolerate her dependency because he could not tolerate his own.
When the therapist suggested to him that with the process of aging, he, too, would one day become dependent, he found this idea insufferable. He could not imagine physically or mentally deteriorating to the point of needing to be cared for. “I would rather lose an arm than become incontinent, needy, and old. If I had to depend on people, they would take advantage of me.” Unconsciously, Andrew believed that if he needed others, they would betray him as his father had done.
With shadow-work, Andrew slowly began to see the family patterns emerging in his marriage during this time of transition. If Annette were to become dependent like a child upon him, he could not rely on her and would feel abandoned as if by a parent. In effect, he would have to become the adult with enough money to support them both. As Andrew thought through his dilemma, he displaced his anxiety about dependency onto money and unknowingly tied together power and money shadows. He calculated that to support them both he would be forced into debt after six months. And to go into debt would mean to disavow his father within, which made him feel terribly anxious.
Therefore, in order to relocate with his wife, Andrew must surpass his father by assuming responsibility, rather than evading it, and by allowing his vulnerable shadow character to be heard. In this way, the crisis situation becomes a doorway to his own development: He can discover a new kind of masculinity that is beyond the father’s son pattern because it includes responsibility without the overbearing senex complex. This pattern of archetypal masculinity, which is postheroic, vulnerable, and connected to soul, has no representation among the prepatriarchal Greek gods. Perhaps Andrew and men like him today, who struggle with these issues, are writing a new story for the rest of us.