Child of the Abyss: Walking the Path of Night and Grief

A Katabasis into the Soul

The past days I have been reflecting. Not just on the journey I had been on the past five years, with the slow descend into the underworld, and kinda wilderness. This being a dual journey, both towards Finland, and its wilds, but also deep within my own unconscious. What one calls a katabasis.

The Collapse of the Outer World

This was not a journey I made merely out of interest and wanting to know. Though the desire to find truth, did play a role in it. Yet on a much deeper layer it was driven by my unconscious itself. Guided by Artemis, my Anima who took also in dreams the shape of Christina, but also the primordial Hecate, which I gave the new epithet Lucia Nyktelios. Since the end of 2020, when everything in my external world had collapsed, it at the same time took away everything I clung to. Leading to a sudden dark night of the soul. Which was but the beginning of the underworld journey for me.

The Ghost Mommy: Shedding the Mask

I eventually started to get driven to heal, and get away from the toxic beliefs from my past, that had instilled in me a sense of being “too much”, “too emotional” and yet “never enough”. Stuck in what I later coined the Ghost Mommy role. This people pleasing and self-sacrificing role, in which I denied all my own emotions, and deep emotional needs. Hiding the deep need to be seen as I am, which was the core wound for me due to the past emotional neglect and social isolation I went through. Next to the cumulative losses within my life. From which the death of Renata and Christina till this day touched me the deepest. Both lost in tragic ways. Yet brought through their presence a warmth and being seen that felt irreplaceable. Like having tasted water once in a desert of emotional void, with the sparse will o’ the wisp, leading one to the hidden sources of relational presence that truly sees.

Scapegoat Complex: Ego Structures and False Redemption

Now part of what kept me stuck in this was the scapegoat complex, which has the parts of wounded inner child, external redeemer (projected onto significant others for instance), inner judge and the wanderer (searching for meaning and connection). This itself is part of the ego structure, where the ego-persona plays the role to hide the wounded inner child (the shadow), whilst the inner judge and external redeemer, has one search externally towards shallow forms of “redemption”. Instead of walking the true inner path towards wholeness. Yet that path is far from easy. It requires more emotional strength and endurance to surrender to the unconscious, and the divine feminine, then to externally play the heroic redeemer.

Korybantic Initiation and the Absorption into Nyx

The path inward led me through a slow spiralling path, which I called at first the Korybantic path, after the sacred protectors of Dionysus, and later the path of Nyx, after the ancient primordial Nyx, womb of existence. This was a deepening path, where the first led me towards wholeness within the structure of the psyche, where the ego becomes aligned with the Self, where the latter led to the ego becoming slowly absorbed into the Self, thus dissolving. Which is the difference between becoming like Bacchus in the ancient Orphic sense, and a Nyktelioi in the Neo-Orphic sense, which is a path not technically necessary for most. Yet at some point I needed to know, and desired to be free of the scapegoat role I was stuck in, within both my dysfunctional family, and the dysfunctional aspects of society I was surrounded by as a child, that still had impacted me greatly.

Undoing Ego Defenses: Breaking the Illusions of Control

For after decades of social isolation, through both the rejection for my emotional depth, and the ego defences I had, this kept me not only from the bonds I yearned for, but also kept me emotionally repressed. Which was something I slowly learned to undo, through the shamanic journeys, and breaking down the ego defences. Like emotional suppression, intellectualisation, people pleasing, or projecting onto other the role of caretaker. In the hope to find the healing I longed for unconsciously. Slowly one by one, I took every single one down. Cutting of all the ways I would cling and avoid reality as it is, and thus my emotions and body. Till I eventually hit the point where my ego defences completely collapsed. This was the true descent into the underworld, where I fell into a depression that nothing could help me out of.

The Underworld: Despair and the Alchemy of Suffering

Which is when a descent to the wilderness or underworld occurs (perhaps a numbing severe depression) where thus the underlying confusion, despair, loneliness, fear and rage are met and suffered. This can take many months, before this process is fully completed. In this descent there are also no available responses from the old levels of effort and will, nor are there easy or collective solutions either. This process often occurs in isolation, without external validation or support. So one is left to navigate this dark period alone, which can be profoundly disorienting and frightening. As Sylvia Brinton Perera wrote this experience is like that of Inanna on the stake or Dionysus dismembered. Like you are being burned alive, feeling a deep pain that just does not seem to stop. Though it eventually does.

Into the Abyss and the Longing for Witness

For me this was an almost two year period slowly leading up to it. Through moments of descent and coming out of it, till in 2024 there was the full descend, from February until November, with still some moments of descend afterwards. Going deeper and deeper into the layers of the emotional abyss, the void of Nyx. Till Eros as a force could more and more fully fill up the vessel I had become. Yet in this process I had no one to hold space with me in person. Something I at the time deeply longed for. In the in person sense, I only had my Anima, as Lucia Nyktelios. Yet the death of Christina during this period of attempted ascend to the land of the living, led me to much like Orpheus to be stuck in grief. For I saw my Anima reflected in her. So her death felt like Orpheus looking back into the cavern, just to see his Eurydice fade once more.

Wholeness is Not Perfection

Yet what my journey did teach me, is that to be whole is to acknowledge ones own shadow, including the wounds and grief one carries. One does not have to be one hundred percent healed and “perfect” to be whole. As wholeness means the ability to sit with ones wounds and grief. To learn to be both a child of the abyss, as much as a child of Nyx of the starry night. To let go of the need to fix, or be fixed. To learn to hold space and see ones wounds. As only through witnessing oneself fully, with all ones wounds and grief, can we also hold space for the wounds and grief of others. Those who similarly carry the desire to be seen in that way, and are ready for it. Now some might say that, my path, akin to Orpheus, grief stricken, wandering alone with my sorrow is tragic. Yet worse would be to wish for someone else to save one from it.

Orphic Sorrow: The Sacred Song of Unanswered Love

This is itself a fate I first recoiled from. As I longed for someone to sit at my side in my grief, to hold space for me, love me in the way of seeing me without needing to fix. Just to be in presence with each other. The realisation of this being something I would not be able to find, that I would wander the world like Orpheus, singing his sorrow struck song of grief and love. Yet even within a world of winter cold, such singing is holy, and so is the grief and love that is carried. Even if never answered. As what is life without the ability to feel, and to love. Even if tinged with sacred grief and sorrow, so even if it remains the song of love forever unanswered. As the very least one loved.