This painting is a little over thirty years old, starting it was one of the triggers that brought me to a terrible dark decline. When I was able to raise my head, the painting drew me back and I was able to paint my way out. The finished work revealed profound insights into my journey. However, it was a different Goddess that had triggered the tumultuous descent. I had been working on an enormous piece on the Descent of Inanna, she was Queen of Heaven, but she wished to enter the underworld which was the rehem of her sister Ereshkigal. In order to do that she had to pass through a series of gates and at each she must relinquish a symbol of her earthly power. When she arrives, she is naked and powerless and is left to rot on pegs with the rest of the dead. After three days however she reaches that point of total surrender, and that moment becomes transcendent, and she is reborn to return to life. It was that very moment I was trying to capture and at that point I realized I had to make the journey to truly understand it. So I started to pour myself out onto pages which I glued to the canvas of what would be the Hecate painting.
It goes without say that the process was effective, I ended up deep in the underworld and I teetered on the brink of suicide, and then I understood what it really meant to surrender. I went on to finish the Inanna piece with a deep sense of understanding the importance and the power of surrender. However, it is to Hecate I am drawn, and I have journeyed to the crossroads to find her many times in my life. She has helped me understand the power of spoken word therapy in healing work. At first, she was just the watcher inside me, it wasn’t until I made the journey to meet her at the crossroads that she showed me the power I had to heal myself. Together we would go looking for what I refer to is the beacon, a sort of relay point set down at trauma that encoded a message that played over and over in my subconscious. When we found this relay point I had to listen carefully to those words, often bitter disparaging and belittling and try if I could to identify the voice the first spoke them then together we would tear down that beacon putting the fragments into Hecate’s cauldron into which we could distil a healing liquid. Then together we would build a new beacon to play a new message, one of love and acceptance. I would then write down that old message and read it out to myself three times trying to feel the points in my body that might hold it to feel the energy of it inside me then I would consign those words to the flames and say” I release you, I release you, I release you’. I have always kept her painting near me so that I do not forget the process. I’ve had the joy and privilege of using this process in workshops with quite large groups of people and the healing and release that we find there it’s deeply moving. Hecate has always been the great constant in my often tumultuous life and I honour her archetype with all my being.