how to navigate lockdown / quarantine time as an underworld journey
Happy Spring Equinox :) - Our society loves "hero's journey" stories about plucky protagonists who set off into the world on a deliberate quest.
"Underworld journey" or "heroine's journey" stories are less popular, I suspect because they're a bit more unnerving. The only famous versions I can think of are Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan.
In an underworld journey story, the protagonist does not set off on a deliberate quest.
The protagonist is just minding her own business, going about her life, when suddenly, the ground beneath her feet falls through or she's swept up into the air.
Before she knows what's happening, she's in another new, strange dimension, a dimension with a weird new set of rules.
All she wants to do is to find her way home, to the normal world she knew and loved.
But it's not easy - in the underworld, she finds herself under attack - she has to battle, scheme, strategize, use her raw wits to maneuver.
Just like you may now have to use your finest wits to find toilet paper ;)
The underworld journey is a mythic parallel to what happens in the psyche during the alchemical process of calcination, a major solve phase.
When a person undergoes calcination, they feel they suddenly have lost almost everything: their whole world is upside-down, their identity and purpose is in flux, it's scary, it hurts, and ultimately - it opens the way for a glorious rebirth.
As we talked about in one of my last messages, right now the whole world is undergoing calcination. We're all in the underworld adventure together.
One of the things that happens during calcination is that our attachment to social conventions gets burned away (along with all our plans for travel, parties, restaurants, sports, etc.)....
... and in that burning away, we're left in a stark confrontation with the contents of the unconscious mind, and all the curious creatures who reside there -- the mysterious guides, the demonic terrors, the petty tyrants, the dashing saviors.
Let's think about Alice in Wonderland for a minute, since Alice's journey is the most distinctly "underworld" in that she literally drops down a rabbit hole.
What all the creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, friendly or foul, have in common - is that they're all teaching Alice about the magic of rapid change, the slipperiness of language, and the paradoxes of how language and social agreement shape identity.
The Mad Hatter asks Alice riddles that seem to have no answer, and explains to her that saying what she means and meaning what she says are not the same thing.
The Caterpillar seems to be able to read Alice's thoughts, answering her questions before she asks them - so that she wonders if her thoughts are really her own.
Alice eats some fungi which make her neck grow very long, so that her head goes up into the trees and a pigeon accuses her of being a serpent trying to steal eggs, and Alice can't effectively dispute the pigeon.
And so on.
All of this strangeness is Alice's confrontation with the cultural unconscious -- where she paradoxically becomes conscious of the way her whole identity is constructed by language and social relativity.
All of which is to say - things are weird right now, and if you feel very disoriented, you're not alone.
Now is the time to let yourself be deeply questioned, changed, and re-arranged by this new reality.
Why? Because the more you let this deep dissolution and questioning happen, the more marvelously you'll be able to re-create yourself and the world.
In my next message I'll get back to talking about essential practices with which to do that.
best,
Carolyn Elliott
author of Existential Kink: unmask your shadow and embrace your power
P.S. If you'd like help navigating this underworld journey and evolving greatly within it -- WEALTH: the life-changing alchemical community where leaders come into their full power via the Hermetic Arts... is now open for application / registration for founding members, this week only.
You can click here to learn more and apply.
P.P.S. I hope you'll join me live tonight at 6 pm Eastern for a rare, free event - The Magician's Guide to Getting What You Want. I'll be giving a rollicking over-view of everything I know about manifestation magic in 1 hour, plus answering your questions on the topic and your questions about WEALTH.
