#291 - The Devil

In many ways all of our preparation has been about meeting this person. The shadow of who we are. The creature whom we have locked away in our own personal hell. The person whom we have banished. We have not only fallen, but we have gone into the depths of darkness and there the true demons we face and the ones which we have created ourselves. The Devil is stern. He confronts you. You are the only person who is responsible for keeping yourself captive, no one else. The sooner you understand this, the better it will be for you. Look at me, look at you, look at us. You are part of the equation, you always have been. Set yourself free.

How do we face down the Devil? It is really simple, it is to accept this shadow part of yourself. Christ's redemption is through compassion. Similarly we must feel compassion for the person we have locked away. We acknowledge our pain and hurt, we acknowledge most of all the shame, the shame which we have had for this things that we have done. We acknowledge the creature we have hidden away and we say we are sorry, we apologise for the way in which we have never acknowledge our role in this how we have blamed others all the time.

And the best part of this is that when we do this, we realise that it wasn't as bad as we thought it was. What was once ripped asunder is joined again, we are whole once more. Then we are ready to face the final leg of our journey. The last crisis before we emerge once more.

The thing though is that part of the journey, which began with the Hanged Man and ends with The Tower, is the most perilous. The crisis is extreme and there is no way around it. There is no way around the mountain, one has to go under it. To face the worst fears and it does feel like a death. It is utterly utterly dangerous.

It seems so sad that we no longer have rituals to help us cope with these real life experiences. Instead, we are fed some silly story, a stupid lie, we are distracted, told things that will make us feel better when really, what we need to do is the hard work of the confrontation of the self. We are always averting our eyes. We think that the journey of the hero is to overcome obstacles externally, when the real hero's journey is the journey that is undertaken to the darkest part of themselves.

This is what The Devil symbolises. As soon as Innana enters Eshkrigal's realm she is captured, judged and condemned to death. And then she is hung on a meathook and is dead for three days. The only thing that saves her is her soul, her soul. And she does this by witnessing the pain which Eshkrigal has gone through. The Devil is Eshkrigal. Like Eshkrigal, he is half man, half beast and terrible to look upon. Once we embrace the Devil, we embrace the parts of ourselves we are most ashamed about, we are free.