The Fall & The Underworld 2
Part Two
From Part One of this essay:
My concern is that we’ve mistaken the Underworld for home. We’ve forgotten the Return.
*
Almost all myths revolve around a triad: exile, encounter with the Underworld and return. We seem to have forgotten the return journey. But deep down many of us feel something’s up. No matter how it glitters and gleams, no matter how it inflames then delivers our desires it’s still the Underworld. It’s just arrived incrementally. No myth functions usefully on a two-step programme, three’s the charm.
A key to identifying the Underworld is struggling to locate a sense of centre. There’s rarely a fixed point from which to orientate. Now as a passage to experience that can be a useful sensation, can engender wisdom, but is absolutely not the place to build your house. It’s not meant for that, or at least it didn’t used to be. Religious feeling at its most effective connects us to a centre outside of ourselves, some holy and sober distance from the never ceasing clash and wail of our desires. The Underworld-as-home doesn’t wish for that kind of rootedness. It wants us twitchy and distracted, caught forever in supply and demand with our desire. It’s phenomenal in its intelligence but feeble in its wisdom. That was the trade that likely started the whole thing back in the garden.
So these days our desires get tended to swiftly, not so much our longings. Our longings are dangerous, Sufis suggesting that the emotional ache of them is actually God speaking back to us. Astonishing. Imagine if you’d known that when you were sixteen? The danger with longing is that we may be longing for the Return. No amount of social media or to-our-door deliveries is going to supply that deeper, more urgent register of the soul. The old word for this distracted, restless, neurotic level of desire was profane. Profane space is superficially competent and spiritually moribund.
I mentioned the angel with flaming sword didn’t I? Maybe the price of admission is a really beautiful story.