[Editor’s Note: This anthology was published by Girl God Books (2022).]
“Restorying Menopause: My Journeys with Inanna, Persephone and Skeleton Woman” by Sara Miller
Menopause needs a reframe. We need to give this Rite of Passage, this journey of unbecoming and of becoming anew, much more respect and honour. Myth can and does provide a powerful context for restor(y)ing menopause. Goddess myths have a particular potency as they offer powerful motifs of descent and rebirth and hold many keys to our personal and collective navigations through this rite of passage.
The night sweats signalled the beginning of my perimenopausal journey. I would wake drenched with sweat, tangled in cold, wet sheets, after the flush of heat had left my body. Sleep was becoming increasingly difficult, and I had enlisted the help of a Chinese Doctor to assist me. I continued with my life as a passionate and determined activist while navigating perimenopause and then along came ACIS. Andeno Carcinoma in Situ is an aggressive form of cervical dysplasia.
Suddenly I was thrust into the medical system. An immediate hysterectomy was suggested and there was a sense of urgency and fear from the medical practitioners and my family. My response was to slow right down. I hit the pause button on my life and dived deeper into the Mystery of my menopausal journey.
I sought guidance in many different and powerful ways, but the guidance that resonated most deeply was that of myth, those Stories Alive that assisted me on my very personal journey through ACIS, cervical cancer and eventually surgical menopause.
Myths provide a powerful map for journeying through our initiations. Embedded in these tales of transformation we can see repeating patterns, of severance, transition, and return.[1] The stories of Inanna, Persephone, and Skeleton Woman were three powerful Story Guides, offering insights and terrain for navigating my journey through menopause.
Severance
These Goddesses were severed from the life they had known before. Skeleton Woman was thrown over a cliff, “for she had done something of which her father disapproved.” Persephone is either abducted into the underworld, or importantly in earlier myths, She willingly descends. Inanna also goes willingly into the Underworld. Severance through descent is the central to their myths, to their journeys and the transformation that follows. I too would need to descend.
Severance is a separation, a tearing away from. It is psychic, and it is bodied. It is the first part of any initiation, including menopause. In my own journey with ACIS I was stepping deeply into the unknown. I had envisaged a much more graceful journey. But then I had to reckon with this disease in my cervix, and in myself.
At the same time my body was tangoing with the hormonal changes of perimenopause, my 14-year-old daughter was doing her own dance with puberty. She had begun bleeding and was navigating mood swings, and some serious eye rolling, a barrage of whatever’s, and an obvious desire to generate distance from me.
It was a painful time and so I turned to the mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Persephone. I found recognition in their story of separation, of loss, and of renewal. Their story gave voice to the depth of the grief I was feeling. I missed my young daughter, and the closeness we had. When Persephone willingly journeys to the underworld, “a chill passes through” Demeter. She tries to entice her daughter to stay in the world of sunshine but to no avail. Demeter must face her daughter’s departure, this rupture of their relationship, and the beginnings of Persephone’s own transformation. She must also face the change that brings for herself.
Their story resonated deeply with me; the grief of letting go and the acceptance and necessity of my daughter’s own adventure through her teenage years. I, like Demeter, was required to step into trust, trusting her to journey well through this difficult period, as she navigated her own hormonal dance of becoming a woman, all the while navigating my own dance.
After being diagnosed with ACIS I journeyed for a year trying to heal myself, and the Stories Alive in my cervical cells. I explored the stories in my body through somatic and shamanic work. I tended to my inner maiden, and the rupture that had occurred in my own teenage years. But 11 months and two cone biopsies later – having declined several offers to remove my womb, I was notified that ACIS had spread from my crypts, and I had cervical cancer. Left unchecked and/or undiagnosed, cervical cancer is a deadly disease. It spreads rapidly through the body. And so I made the painful decision to have a hysterectomy.
With this knowing of my impending surgery I prepared for my departure. In each of these Goddess Myths there are brave souls willing to tend to the Goddesses departure. Inanna has Ninshubar, Persephone has Demeter, and Skeleton Woman has the fisherman. I too called in support. Ninshubar drums for Inanna as she descends into the underworld, and my sisters did just that for me. I also had several womb ceremonies to say goodbye to my womb, to make sacred, this sacrifice of womb to earth, of menstrual cycling to menopause.
It was also necessary to cultivate my own internal Ninshubar, my witness perspective as I tended to my own ghosts and exiled parts. She sang songs of encouragement as I faced death and bade me honour the life/death/life cycles of which menopause is an important component.
Death is a formidable presence in each of these stories. But it’s not only the death of the separate self as proposed in modernity. In these stories death is an integral part of a continuum of death/ life/death. Momento mori Skeleton Woman whispered to me. Momento mori, remember you will die. These whisperings were powerful reminders of the eternal cycle within menopause, and in my particular journey.
Like Inanna before me, on that cold surgical table, I was naked and bowed low. My womb, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and some lymph nodes were cut out of my body. Such radical uncoupling within my bodily self-heralded radical changes in my psyche. This severance is a surrender, a surrendering of who I knew myself to be, and yet these Goddess myths showed me that this was also a process of becoming again.
Transition/Challenges/Initiations
Coming home from hospital I was in a ‘in between’ place, not here, not there, nowhere really. It was the void, the underworld. This is the place out of which all is born and is restored, but for a while everything is unmanifest. For some time there was nothing to do, nothing really but rest, and trust that my body’s illness and recovery are portals to altered states of consciousness, they are ways into this void space. I found it a space of deep embodiment, both of the body and of the void, all at the same time. I found myself more open and permeable to the world alive. The edges of my body were more sharply defined and yet more permeable to sunshine, and rain and wind. Where did my body actually begin and end, what were the boundaries between Her body and mine?
At times I was high on this experience, and on the pain killers. But grief was present too. I had to stay with the grief, tend to all that had already been lost, and for that which I was yet to lose. Like Skeleton Woman I felt myself tumbling across the deep waters of the seabed, of the feminine psyche. I felt outcast from the “normal passage” through it. I was in what Sharon Blackie calls, “a long brewing in the dark cauldron of transformation.”[2] Old griefs, trauma and rage, like characters in an old tale, came to be met. I was meeting the dead aspect of myself, as Persephone does in the underworld. I was meeting my exiled sister/myself as Inanna does and ultimately, I would re flesh myself as Skeleton Woman did.
When all else seemed to be unravelling I held onto the golden threads of Inanna’s, Persephone’s, and Skeleton Woman’s stories. These ancient and transformational stories were essential to my healing.
While Inanna is lying naked and unconscious on a meat hook (a visceral image for someone who has been through a radical hysterectomy) guides are sent to help her. The kurgarra and galatur attend to the pain of Ereshkigal, the Dark Goddess. And in attending, they heard her cries, and in hearing, they echoed her cries. Ereshkigal is so grateful to be heard that She rewards them with the return of Inanna’s body. Listening then provides the necessary integration that will enable her to return transformed from her journey in the underworld.
Similarly in Her story, Persephone willingly goes to the underworld to listen to the “moaning sound” of the bewildered dead. She knows her task is to attend to them, to remind them of their participation in the eternal dance of death/life/death. She “gazes into their eyes” and invites each of them into herself. This merging into Her is a way to return to form, to life, to the manifest.
Menopause offers us all the opportunity to listen to the exiled parts of ourselves. To have compassion for all that we are and are not. To be like the Fisherman in Her story and untangle the bones of Skeleton Woman. There was much in me that needed loving attention and listening.
I then had to ask myself what did I want to nourish? What parts of myself needed to be fed? Skeleton Woman knows to fed herself of the fish drying on the racks, Persephone offers the dead the pomegranate seeds and Inanna, well she is given the food of life. Nourishment comes in many forms in these Stories. Yes, it is food, but it is also truth. The truth to be with ourselves, to be with all parts of ourselves and to stay the course, even though we may want to turn and run. It is also the ability to listen, to drink of the tear, and then to embody our truth. And such embodiment requires our return.
The Return
In each of these stories, the return is a powerful process. It is an essential step in reclaiming themselves and integrating and embodying all that they have gleaned in the dark. It is only after drinking from his tear, being nourished by grief that Skeleton Woman reaches deep into the fisherman’s body. She pulls out his heart and drums it. His heart becomes a mighty drum, and she bangs out a restorative rhythm. The pulsing of life echoes in her dance and song as she fleshes herself back into being. I too was beating out the rhythms of my heart, singing up the loves for an embodied spirituality, for a World Alive and my place within it.
When we have journeyed well in the depths, in the compost and, in the grief, oblivion and communion, then we too rise rooted.
Like Persephone who returns as Queen I was finding my own sovereignty.
In their myths the Goddesses are welcomed back. Demeter greets Persephone. Inanna is met by Ninshubar who has kept vigil for three days and three nights, and Skeleton Woman creeps into bed with the fisherman, putting skin against skin. Each showed me the necessity of a very welcome and embodied return.
It takes time to re flesh the body, and longer to re flesh the psyche. My return has been slow but I have the bone-deep recognition that I am not the woman I was before. This journey through menopause, through cervical cancer with these Goddess guides was necessary to help live more fully within cyclical consciousness. To be a voice, a song, a dance of Her reciprocity and “to Body these myths with my own totemic being”.[3]
References
Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, A Collection of Pre Hellenic Myths, Beacon Press 1992.
Wolkstein D and Kramer S, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth, Harper & Row, 1983.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Skeleton Woman, (gifted by Mary Uukalat) in Women Who Run with the Wolves, Rider, 1992.
Glenys Livingstone, Pagaian Cosmology, Reinventing Earth Based Goddess Religions, iUniverse Inc., 2008.
Martin Shaw, A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness, White Cloud Press, 2011.
Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of Everyday, September publishing, 2018.
[1] Martin Shaw writes of these phases in his book, A Branch from the Lightening Tree. Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness.
[2] Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, p 108.
[3] Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace, p143 in Glenys Livingstone’s Pagaian Cosmology, p109.