May Book Club: Descent to the Goddess

A special invitation to join the community book club collage and chat this month.

"There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return."
– Louise Glück, Averno

For this month’s gathering, we’re doing something a little different.

This month we’re reading Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women by Sylvia Brinton Perera—a small but powerful book about feminine initiation and inner authority. The myth of Inanna’s descent is a painfully accurate pattern of our own journeys of initiation through grief, loss, and death. Her ascent also shows us how to reemerge from the underworld transformed and in touch with our raw feminine power, which is (thankfully!) not always very lady-like.

This book feels like an essential read today. On a personal level, it can illuminate patterns of painful relationships with (in Perera’s words) people exhibiting psychopathic masculine traits, patterns of addiction, or other qualities that keep a woman stuck in the underworld.

But I find it even more important collectively, as so much of our patriarchal inheritance is undergoing a Putrefactio and Mortificatio. The world as we know it is starting to crumble and feminine qualities are being called forward. We need to be brave to undergo these rebirths, rather than crumble into fear and powerlessness.

An evening of collage & chat

New date: Sunday, 1 June, 7-8:30pm BST
Online via Zoom (link provided in the Substack paid subscribers’ chat)

When I was rereading Descent to the Goddess earlier this year, a few other texts came to my attention by wonderful synchronicity, including Louise Glück’s poetry collection Averno—named after a crater lake in Italy considered by Romans as the entrance to the underworld.

I was very moved by studying the two texts together (alongside Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld): two mythical stories of descent and initiation, Inanna’s and Persephone’s. Two stories that felt so familiar. And I found myself wanting to create something tangible as the texts were working deeper on me. So the collage above emerged as a result of that.

For May’s book club, instead of a traditional discussion, I invite you to join me for a 45–50 minute collage-making, followed by a 45-minute discussion and sharing.

Collage is a quiet creative practice that allows images to create themselves, without too much ego involvement (or the need for artistic talent). I’ll start the evening off with a little guided meditation to connect you with your inner images, then we will all create together. Please come prepared with scissors, glue, paper, and some magazines or old books to cut from, so we can start crafting right away.

We’ll follow this with group sharing and discussion. You’re welcome to listen to music (I’ve found an album inspired by the book’s themes, which I’ll share), share your collage, or join the discussion about the book’s Jungian themes. And invite any friends who might enjoy this process!

You’ll hopefully come out with a deeper understanding of yourself and a lovely piece of art to symbolise how these mythical themes come alive in you.

See you then!

---

The Begin Again Book Club is a monthly space for paid subscribers who long for thoughtful, lively conversations on consciousness, the unconscious, and the mysteries of being human. Each month, we gather for a 90 minute live discussion to reflect on what we’re learning, debate ideas, and share how the material is moving us. You can join for only £5/month or £50/year.

May date: Sunday, 1 June, 7-8:30pm BST
Online via Zoom (link provided in the Substack paid subscribers’ chat)