A powerful,original,modern creation of what could be understood as an
underworld initiation in a Western context is Carolyn Hillyer's *Oracle of
Nights* and its accompanying musical production *Cave of Elders*. It works
through a visualization,accompanied by evocative poetic text, that
correlates progression within a sequence of caves with female biology and
female biological cycles.
One that does this in an African context,correlating Igbo/Nigerian ,Sumerian
and Christian motifs is Christopher Okigbo's poetic cycle *Labyrinths*.The
poet/protagonist journeys from an invocation to the goddess of his village
stream,to the sources of being and into the bowels of the earth,where he is
united with the goddess,who has become,not just a local spirit,but the
'water spirit that nurtures all creation'.
Some contemporary developments of the Arthurian motif seem to be doing
something similar,such as the physical and imaginative exploration of
Glastonbury Tor by Kathy Jones and Jhenna Tellyndru. Moyra Caldecott's *The
Green Lady and the King of Shadows* develops a related theme in exploring
the Tor,an imaginative exploration that embodies a conflict between good and
evil operating between temporal zones.
Dante's *Divine Comedy* provides a powerful framework that could be adapted
in developing a ritual that would include both an underworld and a celestial
initiation.Doing that would benefit from Dante scholarship that demonstrates
the symbolic significance of the poet's journey through hell,purgatory and
heaven as evocative of developments in consciousness,the kind of
scholarship evident in the translations of Dante into English by Dorothy
Sayers,Barbara Reynolds,John Sinclair,among others.One could also use
illustrations of Dante like those by William Blake and Salvadore Dali.
thanks
toyin
On 1 July 2010 14:18, mark rance <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Qlippoth and Magic, <http://RteFrame_15.1.3059.0405.html?pf=pf#S1> Goetic
> Spirits ('Lesser Key of Solomon', etc.)<http://RteFrame_15.1.3059.0405.html?pf=pf#S2>What these threads illustrate for me is a lack of any kind of underworld
> initiation within the west over a period of time (Unless it assumed a
> Christianised form) I think the dealings with the Infernal and Fallen angels
> are a way to retain this kind of knowledge. If the contested idea of
> kabbalah having a greek origin is taken into account and the greek notions
> of thought that influenced Judaic thinking are observed then perhaps it is
> natural within the context of modern thought and its development to create
> an underworld that seems to be lacking to the modern practitioner. A way of
> reclaiming hell in a sense or redefining it out of Judaeo Christian terms
> into modern and post modern Magickal and Neo Pagan narratives. People seem
> to approach this by re-appropriating Christian mythology with adversarial
> mythopoesis or turning to the envisioning of other traditional narratives of
> the After or Under.
>
> The narrative structure of the Threshold has largely received an
> authoritarian narrative in western cultures because of perhaps the power
> their is perceived to be in controlling the definitions of such borders as
> those between life and death, punishment and pleasure for example. This
> restructuring or recapturing of these thresholds is perhaps why so many now
> enter into these so called 'darker' areas. As any kind of ancestral lineage
> is heavily established in Orthodox norms, some establishment of creative,
> rewarding and illuminating explorations are undertaken in order to regain a
> sense of connection to what feels to have been lost, yet remains an inherent
> part of life and the psyche.
>
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