Feminine Initiation Rituals, Planned and Unplanned: What the Plights of Persephone, Inanna, and Psyche Teach Us About Journeying into the Underworld (In Person)

This event will be livestreamed via Zoom. This product listing is for in-person attendance. If you wish to view the livestream/participate via Zoom instead, please register here.

Scholarship Fund Benefit! All proceeds from this event will be donated to the C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis Scholarship Fund by Francesca!

Journeys to the underworld are associated with transformation, depression, and/or facing great difficulties. Someone depicted as “being in the underworld” is most assuredly struggling. The journey can be sudden and unexpected, such as the death of a loved one, a serious health crisis, or a disaster, natural or otherwise. These individuals may relate to Persephone, who is abducted by Hades and forcebly taken to his kingdom in the underworld, her life torn asunder.

One can choose this arduous journey, such as volunteering for humanitarian relief in an area torn apart by war, disease, or natural disaster. This journey is like Inanna’s, who travels to the underworld of her own volition to rescue her dead husband. This journey is undertaken consciously.

Lastly, one may encounter the underworld when faced with impossible choices. This is like Psyche, who when punished by Aphrodite, must descend into the underworld—or die by Aphrodite’s hand—to borrow Persephone’s beauty box. We can understand these journeys as feminine initiation rituals. 

In mythology the underworld is not synonymous with the Christian view of hell. It is simply a place for the dead. But one does not travel there lightly. Anyone who travels to the underworld is forever changed.

So how do we understand these journeys to the underworld? They are certainly feminine rites of initiation. Although the content remains secret, the initiation rituals surrounding the mysteries at Eleusis helped people grapple with issues of life and death, transformation and initiation.

In current times, analysis, art, and numinous experience help initiates move through these challenging experiences and assist people as they grapple with life’s difficulties and complexities. In this presentation, Francesca will examine how encounters with these archetypes impact the way individuals face adversity, and ways to interface with them.