Reclaiming sovereignty in the depth of the Earth
A shiver went down my spine as I saw them looking at me threateningly. The cows I mean.
It was dusk, I had been driving for hours under the perpetual cycle of cloudy sky, drizzle and heavy downpour. Thankfully when I got to my destination, at the end of a small gravelly road in County Roscommon, Ireland, the heavens decided to take pity on me. They knew pretty soon I would have more challenging obstacles to face.
There were twenty of them, lined up like a platoon ten steps away from the entrance of the Oweynagat Cave, an unassumingly small hole in the field that marked the beginning of a 37 metres long drooping descent into the bowels of the Earth. The dwelling place of the Morrigan, one of Ireland fiercest sovereignty Goddesses, and my destination for the evening. If I could get past the cows, that is.
As so often it happens in life, even reaching the starting point of a transformative journey requires guts, and a desire (or pain) strong enough to compel multiple attempts. When I parked the car in front of the entrance gate to the field and asked the local farmers if I could enter their property to visit the cave (always ask for permission, you never know who or what is guarding the land), I was told “Sure, just beware the cows”. I naively thought I would jauntily stroll through the field while the cows kept minding their own business. Alas, as I started making my way through, the first stopped eating and turned towards me, then the second, then the entire herd of them rose their heads and started circling me. I backpedaled fast out of the gate. They were cows but they distinctly made me think of the crows of Alfred Hitchcock's iconic movie with their fixed stare.
From the safety of beyond the gate, I resorted to my tested and true trick to deal with 90% of the challenges I encounter: smile and try to make friends. My Italian cooing and waving of fresh grass unfortunately did not endear me to the cows. However it might have been perceived as sufficiently malicious to warrant the buckling and galloping away of the entire herd.
Now I had access to the cave. It’s guarded by a tree-bush. A hawthorn, of course. I bent down and started my scrambly descent into the hobbit-sized entrance to the cave, past the first real gate, made of a repurposed ogham stone reading Fraech son of Mebd. Of course as I just briefly studied the ogham, the ancient Irish tree script, I had to trust in my previous research as far as the translation was concerned.
Very fast I lost sight of the dim twilight light from the field and was surrounded by darkness, mud, cold humidity and the drip-drips of water from the ceiling. And my heaving breathing. No head torch, just the flashlight from my phone, which I was holding in a death grip for fear that it would fall onto the swampy floor never to be seen again, damning me to get smothered by the heavy cloak of darkness.
The second step of any journey, after the rocky beginning, is the realisation that, to proceed further, you need to let go of what burdens you carry. Emotional or otherwise. For they served to keep you safe but are now the yoke that’s holding you anchored to a previous version of yourself you want to shed, like snake skin. I had to make a quick choice between remaining clean and, well, make it into and out of the cave safely. I chose the latter and started leaning on the narrow, slippery, walls of the cave for balance, rubbing mud and water on my jacket as if it was mimetic paint. My breathing was heavy and I could see barely half a metre in front of me, a vision of stagnant water, earth and foggy exhales. The light was swaying - I dare you to crawl through a cave and keep a stable pointer - and I did not know how far along I was, focused on putting one foot in front of the other and not falling down and completely losing my remaining sense of where was up and where was down.
Abruptly, the cave opened upwards and I could raise my head to see the rigged womb-like ceiling. Puffs of breaths rose like stygian smoke towards the deeper, tangible darkness in front. I read about this place in stories and blogs of other seekers like me, that went on their own initiation journey inside the Morrigan’s Cave.
“What if something happens and nobody knows?” “What if I lose the flashlight?” “What am I even doing here?” Trying even now to recover the questions vibrating through my mind draws mostly blank. Because the sense of anxiety and dread you feel while wading through the boggy grounds and groping your way forward doesn’t have anything to do with any of the few but reasonable concerns that any human pretending to be a lone speleologist would have. Those sensations are primal, more akin to an animal sensing danger in the quivering of the air and in the subtle smells of copper and iron.
Once organised religion came to Ireland and started painting with a sheen of Christianity the old beliefs and traditions, Oweynagat came to be known as the Gate to Hell. Hell being a cunning misinterpretation of the Irish Otherworld, the place the old Gods and Goddesses selected as their abode, leaving the Upper World to us humans. So the Otherworld is actually a place of deep, instinctual knowing, of magic and primal powers - filled with promises but also dangerous. Because no knowledge or power is acquired without a cost. It figured it was too dangerous to the (patriarchal) establishment and we were warned against entering it.
“To reclaim that sovereign power, that burning core of wisdom, you need to face the darkness, the loneliness, the terror. ”
After the widening of the cave, that distinctly reminds you of a birthing channel (for a new version of yourself?) my path became more and more muddy and slippery. Eyes stretched wide open, I still could not figure out where to safely step without sinking into the muck. I was leaning heavily on the dripping walls, straining to find stable ground. Until just…there wasn’t any to be found.
Everywhere, my boots were being sucked into the Earth. Typical to find a last hurdle before the end of the journey, as I could finally light the end of the cave with my flimsy phone torch. At that point I considered giving up and going back. I made it pretty far already, didn’t I?
I stood perched precariously on a semi-submerged pebble for what could have been aeons or just a few minutes, when something snapped within me. I decided then and there that nothing, not even myself, would keep me from getting to my destination, the end of the cave. Biting my phone between my teeth I took off one boot, then the other, then took off my socks and stepped forward. Every step I took I was wrangling with the frigid mud - would she give way to me? Would she lull me into thinking I could go down only a few centimetres but then let me plunge until my calf? Would she release me once I lifted my feet or keep me bogged down in place?
As I found my footing I found an increasing sense of inner stability and somehow I made it to slightly drier ground, the end of Oweynagat. There was no place to sit so I just squatted on my haunches and turned off my flashlight. I was just me, and the chill and the darkness. So thick I could almost taste it seeping like syrup through the pores on my skin. It’s uncanny to have your eyes open and see absolute nothing.
“Reach out and there is nothing there. There is only you, whatever you might be, face-to-face with the long dark.”
In this complete alone-ness, the Otherworld asks you: who are you? You are in the Earth and of the Earth and, eventually, you are the Earth. Breathing in and out, hearing the drip-drops, the cave became my confessional. And as with all confessionals, I will keep those whispered promises between me and the Otherwordly powers there, in the secret sacred mud of Oweynagat.
What I can say is that, in my crouched meditation in that cave, I became something else, and perhaps somehow more myself. All the cells in my being morphed into a version of myself that desires to bite on life like a carnivorous beast, sipping the blood and gnawing the bones of this existence. There, it seemed incredibly funny to think of how much we usually squeeze ourselves into uncomfortably small forms. Going through life comparing ourselves, looking at others’ expectations and judgments as if they actually mattered. While at our core I am - and we all are - powerful beyond imagination, bright enough to dispel all darkness, untouchable.
Coming out was a shorter, almost giddy affair. I was high, felt like dancing and my beating heart sounded like a war drum: “Life, I’m coming out, you better be ready for me!”
Now, I wish that this was the journey to end all journeys. That what I found at the bottom of the Earth could keep blazing in my awareness every day and that I could stand in my sovereignty every single waking hour. This makes for a good fairy tale, “and they lived happily ever after”.
What comes after the ever after? The natural expansions and contractions of life, or as the yogic philosophy would say, the illusions that veil ourselves from our true nature.
So where I found the true sense of my journey to the bowels of the Earth (and our inner psyche) is in the touching and in the embodied feeling that, at the core, we are that powerful, that knowledgeable, that fearless.
“Because we can pretend it didn’t happen, we might convince ourselves it was all in our imagination, we could even forget, but we can never un-experienced it.”
