Paragraph one:
In my own personal Palimpsest view of the metaphysical world (which I'll explain and argue for later), the God is both dead and in the underworld with the Old Goddess, getting restored and rebuilt for his rebirth, and he's transformed into the stag that guards the herd and the sleeping Winter Goddess, who is also being restored and rebuilt so that she can give birth to him at Yule. Just as she's the Moon and the Earth year round, he's the Stag and the Shadow in winter.
The official Trad-Wicca Descent Myth is a lot like Inanna (or here, too). The reasons and motivations are just shifted around a little. I'm still unsure how I feel about this story; I prefer Inanna's, or the Palimpsest version...
Paragraph two:
Really, most Descent Myths would fit; NeoPaganism is flexible like that.
Inanna:
- The stories / translations disagree on why she's there in the first place-- usually, they just say she went down, though her sister already hates her, so this isn't really a great idea. The Wiccan story gives her the motivation of wanting to know how Death works.
- Worldly power doesn't mean anything to the Underworld. You arrive there the same way you arrive in this world, naked and powerless.
- Since you can't be alive there, and you can't leave once you're there, the only way is to make you match the situation: Inanna has to die.
- This is also Dmuzi's resurrection story; it seems the Oldest Gods repeated each other's stories alot.
- The beings that go to retrieve Inanna are sometimes a very pretty boy-- but he doesn't please Ereshkigal or become her consort the way they seem to think he should; she's maybe an early angry feminist, and ideas like not marrying and holding power might have been weird and hard to deal with that far back. This is conjecture; I'll have to look into that.
- Some of the stories say that while Inanna was dead, Ereshkigal was 'like a woman in labor', which seems to indicate that they switched roles for a bit, and neither was all that happy with it.
Osiris:
- Sometimes, it starts with Set trapping him in a sarcophagus and tossing him in the Nile, and the sarcophagus floating all the way across the Med to get trapped inside a cedar tree and then built into a palace, but to me, this feels like a comment on another culture appropriating their myths to base their own power on. I'd like to study that anthropologically, if I ever manage to get into a school for that...
- Did Osiris also guard the Sun on it's nightly journey through the Underworld? I think I remember that, but I couldn't find it; maybe that's my brain weaving stories together again.
Demeter and Persephone:
- There's an idea that this explains how marriage happens, too; if so, I'm glad I'm not marrying in Ancient Greece or Rome.
- There's also an idea that Persephone was an Underworld Deity before she was a free-floating nature deity, and that makes the story seem different, switching the focus-- though I haven't decided which way it reads now. Maybe I need to start writing papers on mythology.
- 'Wife' and 'captive' seem to be interchangeable in these stories. I wonder if there was an idea that after she was kidnapped, she came to love her Underworld captor? Was love even something expected of marriage? This needs a new story. It also implies that she was forced from maidenhood to womanhood, usually by force. This is uncomfortable in a modern context; how was it experienced back then?
- At one time, Persephone was the parthenogenic daughter of Demeter; she didn't need a man for creation, and maybe that's why she had to be kidnapped by a man and imprisoned in the Underworld?
Sources:
Wikipedia is great for reminding me how the myths go, and for getting all the links together in one place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_to_the_underworld AND http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-death-rebirth_deity
This didn't really add much, but it's interesting and I found it while researching this: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/grahn/chapt13.htm - Narratives: Descent Myths and the Great Flood
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