Desperately Seeking Persephone by Janet Rudolph, Book Review by Carolyn Lee Boyd, Part One

The myths of the descents of the Sumerian Inanna and the Greek Persephone to the underworld have fascinated and inspired women for millennia with their violence and betrayal, leaving behind all you love and that hold you up, and facing your deepest fears, even death. We recognize our own traumas in their struggles and seek guidance as to how to navigate our ascents back to wholeness and well being in their stories.

After her own experience of childhood abuse and stranger rape as a young woman, Janet Rudolph, one of FAR’s co-weavers, also pored over the myths in hopes of finding a helpful account of their journey home. “Once I had tumbled metaphorically, literally and mythically into the thorny quagmire of the underworld, it was devilishly hard to escape. I felt lost. I needed a guide, a role model to find my path outward”(xii). The problem is, Janet says, “The stories of their return are glossed over. There is no detailed story called From the Great Below Back to the Great Above” (15). Until now in Janet’s recently re-published book, Desperately Seeking Persephone.

Instead of simply wondering how Inanna and Persephone made it back from the underworld, as many of us do, Janet asked them. In fact, she invited them to a fantastical pajama party, including cocoa and blankets and followed every pathway they opened for her. “Hell as a place had never been a concept in the Sumerian and Greek worlds of Inanna and Persephone. But hell, as an emotional state of trauma, helplessness, darkness, and hopelessness, was a space we had occupied together. Henceforth, I decided we would call ourselves the Hellies Club to mark the time we had spent in the underworld” (23).

Now, decades and many shamanic experiences later, she has filled in the story of her return, her ascent back to the upper world from the underworld, as magical, dramatic, and adventure-filled as any myth, and given us signposts to make our own way in a book that is truthful, honest, open-hearted, mind-opening, humorous, and enlightening.

Signpost #1. Be open to all pathways that might hold answers, to all those who cross our lives at just the right time.

Inanna and Persephone listened deeply to Janet’s story and promised to find her a Mystery School, like the ancient Greek Schools based on Persephone’s own Eleusinian Mysteries. “Trust me. I will find you a mystery school. It will be a call to action, to experience. Perhaps some fun as well” (32).

Janet’s first step directed by these two pagan goddesses was towards a Catholic priest, Father Ted, who ran an an educational program to which Janet was assigned as a teacher. He also introduced Janet to Sr. Compassion, an artist nun who also lived her name. Their loving influence was healing enough to enable Janet to fall in love and marry. “I think the most important thing about this stage of my life is that I learned about love. What Ted started; my family continued” (50). And, as soon as this lesson had been implanted, Father Ted disappeared.

Signpost #2. Make friends with death, “that way it cannot haunt you” (108).

Finally, 18 years after Persephone’s promise, Janet was led to a mystery school run by a husband and wife team. “The central theme of any Mystery School is to teach people to face their own fears. Usually that involves facing our own mortality” (63). But the message was not only about our bodies dying physically. “It is dying to old ways in order to let in new ones. It can be transformational if we embrace our deaths, thus making our lives less fearful and more full” (109.)

Her most meaningful means of transformation was the “original baptism,” or bathing, in which apprentices would “go into the waters in the dark of night and come out at the dawning of day. The symbolism is the cycle of experiencing the darkness of death and then the light of rebirth” (65). Fear and cold caused her to shake uncontrollably, which reminded her of her rape “but here is the biggest and perhaps the most important difference. In the case of bathing, it was a pathway I chose to take. It was the pathway that brought me face-to-face with my fears. I could now understand how it was that Inanna chose to go face her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld” (66).

Janet shares with us that this journey was not easy, was not without risk, and does so delightfully by letting us in on what she was thinking. When she is first plunged into icy waters while “bathing,” we hear her say to herself “What the friggin’ H am I doing here? How long does it take for frostbite to settle in? How much will the antibiotics cost when I get bronchitis again?” (58).

During the time at the Mystery School, Janet had other transformational experiences that challenged traditional ideas of everyday reality, expanding her understanding of the forces and beings with whom we share the Earth. During one trip, Janet, her teachers, and her fellow apprentices were visited by the three bright lights, who one of the Mystery School leaders identified as the Archangel Michael. With all the mystery and adventure, Janet’s attitude soon became “Here I was fulfilling my dream. In a few short months I had gone from being a bored, depressed, suburban housewife to Indiana Jones level adventure” (97).

During this time, Persephone and Inanna brought with them the three Norns, Norse goddesses in charge of human destiny. They told her, in their unique way of each speaking a different version of a word, “all is movement/flow/dance.” “You are the dancer/performer/originator and you can influence your own dance if you choose/opt/desire” (102).

As Janet explains, “The most overarching lessons that I’ve learned is that energy at its most basic is simply movement involving particles, molecules, and atoms. How I experience that movement…the distinguishing aspect is what’s coming from me” (94).

But she also learned valuable tools that she shares in detail in the book with us, her readers, about how to focus our attention, how to step outside time for revelations, the “triple secret of mudra, mantra, and mandala” (59). She also explains three Mystery School teachings that she still follows today (106):

• Look at the world through youthful “baby eyes” that see wonder and amazement in even the more “ordinary” aspects of life.
• Always speak the truth.
• Do all with an open and loving heart.

To learn about the rest of Janet’s shamanic adventures, read Part Two, to be post tomorrow.

Source: Rudolph, Janet. Desperately Seeking Persephone, FlowerHeartProductions.