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The descent of a god or goddess into the underworld is an extremely important pattern found in the ancient myths, scriptures and sacred stories of cultures around the world.
The pattern is found in the scriptures of the New Testament (so-called) in the cycle of the death of Jesus and his return. However, it is also found in the Osiris cycle of ancient Egypt, in the adventures of the divine Maui of the cultures of the Pacific, in the descent of the Hero Twins to the dreaded realm of Xibalba in the Popol Vuh of the Maya of Central America, as well as in the descent and recovery of the goddess Persephone in the myths of ancient Greece, and many other traditions found in other cultures as well.
The indispensable Alvin Boyd Kuhn argues that the myths describing the descent of the god or goddess into the underworld actually dramatize for our deeper understanding the descent of our own incarnation -- the process which occurs with the birth of every single man or woman who has ever lived, a process which brings divine spirit down into the material realm to dwell for a time in a human body. It is the descent of the divine spark into the "underworld" of matter, the "tomb" of the physical body, which is being depicted in these myths, Kuhn argues. In his 1940 magnum opus, entitled Lost Light: An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures, Kuhn writes:
The incarnation, for the soul, was its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that could be poetically dramatized as "death." Our inability to comprehend any but the physical sense of the word "burial" has left us easy victims of ancient poetic fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be held by any religious group. 158
Elsewhere, he writes: "In the esoteric doctrine which regarded the present life as death, and the living body as the soul's tomb, we have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter" (178).
The mourning of the god or goddess who has descended into the underworld is a widespread pattern found in many of these myths. We find it in the case of the god Baldr in the Norse myths, and in the myth of Persephone of ancient Greece. We also find this tradition in Christianity in the season of Lent which is a period of approximately six weeks (forty-two days) of fasting, mourning and self-denial in observation of the death and descent into the underworld of Jesus.
The period of forty days upon which the fasting period of Lent is patterned is sometimes said to derive from the number of days which we are told that Jesus fasts during his period of temptation in the wilderness, described in the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 4 (and particularly Matthew 4: 2).
Alvin Boyd Kuhn provides further insight into the number forty and relates it again to the concept of the descent of the divine spark into the mortal body, envisioned in the ancient myths as a kind of "living death" in Kuhn's analysis. He writes:
Since the number forty alphabetized in symbolic script the period of gestation of soul in matter, it was chosen as the time for fasting and abasement. This fasting is but another glyph for the privation and lack of true spiritual being suffered by the god in the flesh. Forty days of lamentation and grief were set aside to commemorate the death and burial of the sun-god and the shrouding of his light in the tomb of matter. For ten thousand years BC it was part of the celebration of the cult of Iusa, the ever-coming or annually-coming solar god, to keep the forty days and nights in which the sun-hero in the underworld fought the battle with Out and his Sebau "fiends," in the desert of Amenta. Forty days was the period of seclusion after childbirth appointed for the women by Parsee and Levitical law. In the transformation of Apis, when the old bull died, its successor remained forty days shut up on an island in the Nile. The spies sent out returned after forty days. For forty days Goliath came out to fight each day (1 Samuel 17). David reigned forty years. Moses was with Jehovah in the Mount forty days and nights. Jesus was forty days on earth after his resurrection. Forty appears in the Old Testament some sixty-three times. Forty days was the length of the incubation period of grain in the mud and water before germinating in Egypt; and the human foetus gestates forty weeks. The period of forty days after the planting was a time of scarcity and fasting, which, says Massey, gave a very natural significance to the season of Lent, with its mourning for the dead Osiris, to be followed by rejoicing when the grain germinated. This was transferred to the [. . .] Gospels and became a fast of forty days during which Jesus wrestled with Satan and was hungry. 444 - 445.
It is extremely noteworthy that in the texts of ancient Sumer, the goddess Inanna (known as Ishtar to the later Akkadian cultures of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who inherited significant aspects of Sumerian culture) goes down into the underworld of her own free will, is imprisoned there for three days and three nights, and then is rescued by her second-in-command, the Ninshubur.
The ancient text known as Inanna's Descent (English translation available here from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature) tells us that the goddess Inanna (pictured above on an imprint from an ancient cylinder seal) was turned into a corpse and hung up on a hook during her time in the realm of the dead. This fact is significant, as I argue in my most-recent book The Ancient World-Wide System, because it is very likely that Inanna hanging on a hook is associated with the same constellation Ophiuchus which forms the celestial pattern for Jesus hanging on a cross.
Indeed, in the ancient texts describing the cycle of Inanna's Descent, the importance of mourning and lamenting (a pattern found in so many other myths involving the descent of the god or goddess into the underworld) which is also observed during the Christian season of Lent (beginning on Ash Wednesday) features very prominently in the myth.
Before she goes down to the underworld, Inanna leaves strict instructions with her minister Ninshubur that when Inanna arrives in the realm of the dead, everyone is to mourn for her. When Inanna is released from the underworld after hanging as a corpse on a hook for three days, she is released only on the condition that she find a substitute to send to the underworld in her place. So, when she returns to the land of the living, she comes across various men and women who are described as sitting in the dust, clothing themselves in a filthy garment, and mourning for Inanna who has gone down to the underworld. Each time, the demons from the underworld ask Inanna if they can seize this man or woman and drag him or her back to the underworld to take Inanna's place, and each time the goddess replies in the negative, because by mourning they are obeying her directions.
However, when Inanna comes to the great apple tree in the plain of Kulaba, she finds her consort Dumuzid the shepherd dressed in a magnificent garment, seated in luxury upon a throne. Inanna is furious. She looks at him with the look of death, and informs the demons that they can take Dumuzid to the underworld. Later, she mourns his departure and allows him to return to the realm of the living for half of the year, and spend the other half in the realm of the dead.
While I agree with Alvin Boyd Kuhn that the ancient myths regarding the descent of a god or goddess into the underworld dramatizes profound teachings regarding our own soul's descent into this incarnate life, I would also argue that these myths teach as one of their central themes our own loss of connection to our essential self, who is suppressed and even in fact buried by the egoic self.
This alienation and disconnection from the essential self can be demonstrated to be a central theme running through the world's ancient myths, scriptures, and sacred stories, and some aspects of this division are discussed in previous posts such as:
What could be the point of this heavy emphasis on mourning for the god or goddess who has descended into the underworld?
I would argue that this emphasis on mourning, found in myths literally around the globe which relate to this theme of the dying god or goddess who descends into the underworld, dramatizes for our understanding the importance of perceiving our disconnection from our essential self, our divine or higher and authentic self, and of seeking reconnection with our own essence.
The sad fact is that a great many men and women who are in fact alienated from themselves do not even know it! They do not even realize they have been disconnected from their own essence, and thus they neither mourn the fact nor seek to find their own authentic self, who has been buried by the creation of the egoic mind. They may even deny the existence of such a thing as the higher self.
In this sense, they are like Dumuzid in the myth of Inanna's Descent, acting as though nothing at all is wrong -- completely oblivious to the descent of the goddess into the underworld.
The myths teach us that the proper response to this profound disconnection is to mourn it as a catastrophic problem -- and to seek to recover the connection to our own authentic self, no matter what it takes.
image: Wikimedia commons (link).
