Betty De Shong Meador
Chiron Publications, 1992
Uncursing the Dark, by Betty Meador, is an inspiring work of rediscovery and reclamation of the archetypal feminine from ancient times to the present. The book is comprised of five essays, written over a period of twenty years and reflects Meador's own journey of discovery. She begins with her own early childhood experiences of seeing with eyes informed by the feminine, moves on to the Navajo Blessingway ritual, and then plunges into the beauty and terror of the myth of Inanna with her own beautiful translations of the poetry of this ancient myth of feminine initiation and individuation.
We are brought into the sacred archetypal feminine space of Changing Woman through the Blessingway ritual. In this ritual, the Medicine Man forges a connection between spirit and matter, using objects such as corn pollen. Meador leads us through the three days and two nights of the ritual, sitting, sleeping, and eating on the hard-packed dirt floor of the Navajo hogan, warmed by sheepskins and buffalo rugs and lulled by the chanting of the Medicine Man as he seeks to heal his patient. For Meador, this experience with the Navajo marked "the first stirrings of a long search for my roots as a woman in a religion based on the archetypal feminine premise that the divine infuses nature with her substance" (p. 6).
As I read Uncursing the Dark, I found myself thinking of an old nursery rhyme: What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice! What are little boys made of? Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails! How early in life we are split, given to projecting our darkness out--onto men, onto others--denying and disowning the powerful and important parts of our feminine being. With Inanna we journey to the depth of the underworld to a place where she comes to discover her power, connection, and devotion to the cycles of all living things--not only the creative and productive, but the dying and rotting without which life cannot go on. We are challenged to find ways to reconnect with our own cycles--our menses--in relation to the waxing and waning moon, the fertile and fallow seasons of the earth and "the beauty of what is."
In Meador's work we find direction and guidance in our search for our long buried connections to the archetypal feminine. She invites us to plumb the depths of the unconscious, the dark resting place of those forces which bring both life and death. She tells us, "Inanna demands we bow down, become submissive to her as giver of our fate. If we are fully open to her, we cannot avoid suffering and tragedy that is woven into life. Inanna is not evil. She is the stark horror and beauty of what is" (p. 125).
This is a book for women of all ages. It validates our inner knowing, those glimmerings that come in dreams and visions, of the archteypal femine and what it truly means to be a woman.
--Bev Osband