Easy the descent to Avernus –
Day and night Death’s gate gapes –
But to recall your steps back to this world, to climb back to the daylight,
This is the exploit, this the agony.
(Virgil’s Aeneid, Bk VI, lines 126 - 129, translation mine)
So speaks the Sibyl of Cumae, the prophetess who, possessed by the power of Apollo, aids the Trojan hero Aeneas in his journey through Avernus, the land of the dead. The Aeneid is filled with rich characters – Juno, Dido, Turnus, Camilla – but the Sibyl ravishes the reader as the god does her.
The above lines are some of my favorite in the entire work, and I view them as an essential psycho-spiritual teaching. The Underworld is the shadow side of the psyche, of life, and holds close all the horrors that lurk within us and around us, a dungeon visited by everyone, willing or no (so, too, declares the oldest goddess myth we have on record, The Descent of Inanna, whose first line reads “She opened her ear to the Great Below”).
Many alleged spiritual teachers, especially those who read The Secret in the early 2000s and thrilled to learn you can use intentionality to become a millionaire materialist, claim that happiness is our birthright and love is our natural state. This claptrap implies that we are the agents of our fate, that we can choose to be happy, successful, powerful, and anything else is moral cowardice. (Ask the hostages of Hamas in Gaza, ask the Palestinian survivors of the Israeli bombing campaign if they had a choice in their undoing, and then tell them to, “Buck up!”)
At a coffee shop several years ago, I met a forensic traumatologist, a woman who worked with people who’d been trafficked or those who’d escaped war zones. She told me that, in studies, people who get revenge on their persecutors suffer PTSD at far lower rates than those who don’t. Then she told me of a study wherein a pride of lions killed and ate a baby elephant; the pachyderm matriarch rounded up her sisters and trampled the baby lions in revenge.
The gods of ancient Greece swore their unbreakable oaths on the river Styx, the first river of the Underworld, over which the souls of the dead are borne by Charon. Styx comes from the Greek word stygeo, which means hatred. The gods, who lie, cheat, rape, steal, whose morality is utterly human and yet seems to us unfair, only honor an oath sworn on hatred; therefore, as depth-psychologist James Hillman writes in The Dream and the Underworld, “hatred plays an essential part in the universal order of things.”
So much for “Live, Laugh, Love.”
Of equal necessity, though, is the need to return from the abyss. Some people refuse the journey down. Some people never come back up, and yet the Sibyl declares that the return is the real labor. That last line in the original Latin reads, “Hoc opus, hic labor est.” “Labor” is, of course, the origin of our English “labor,” but it also means “distress, suffering" in Latin.
We can count on suffering. So says the Buddha, but how do we choose life when we’re surrounded by the shades of the dead? How do we climb back out of the pit once we’re down there?
The Sibyl tells our hero that if he wants to be ferried twice over the river Styx, once into Hades and once out, he must perform an elaborate ritual to insure the blessings of the Underworld deities. These ceremonies are, by and large, unavailable to us today, as are these gods, although they live inside us, demoted to demonic forces post-Christianity, post-Enlightenment, post-science. In a culture obsessed with “reality,” what we can perceive with our senses or the instruments that expand our sensory power, we must lay ourselves on the altar of the psychological shadow. Propitiate the gods of suffering with your suffering, and you’ll gain the treasure hoarded in Hell.
Cry all of your tears. Get comfy with your cruelty. Shake your fist at Jesus. Curse the gods and the ancestors and the psychopomps, your principles, your parents, and your therapist. Traverse the depths as an offering to the chthonic powers of your own soul, and there will come a day when they show you the door to the day world.
Don’t worry: you’ll never be far from the land of the dead. Those who’ve tasted its food can never fully leave, but all the better: to know suffering is to know joy, to know loss is to know what is precious, to know despair is to embrace the sweet idiocy of hope.
Ten years ago, I had my second stroke. Paralyzed from the collarbone to the toe, bifurcated, I was given a life-saving drug whose only catch was that it could cause brain hemorrhage and death. In ICU that night, as my faithful husband slept in the chair by my side, I heard a commotion in the hallway among the nurses. In the fluorescent-lit hallway, beyond the windows of my room, they scurried to and fro, until, at last, in the darkest hour of the night, without ceremony, without a sound, without someone to sob or stand hand-clapped-to-mouth, my neighbor left the floor, zipped in a black bag.
Some months later, lying in the grass at a friend’s house, I looked up and saw a yellowing leaf against an azure sky. And I wept in joy at its ephemeral beauty.
This is the exploit, this the agony.
(Above image is Michelangelo’s Sibyl of Cumae in the Sistine Chapel.)
Greg, powerful and true. thank you. sonia