We have been taught to ascend, to transcend, to rise above,to exit our bodies and the Earth…. But there is a place below the surface of our coping, our understanding and our spiritual narratives. It is not a place of thought, but of being.
Codex Three is the sacred inversion: the call to go down.Not as a punishment, but as a homecoming to the parts of ourselves and our world that have been exiled or demonised into shadow, inferiority and unacceptability.
The descent is not a collapse into despair; it is aconscious passage into the roots. It is where our personal grief touches
ancestral grief, where our rage meets the rage of the violated Earth, where our numbness confesses its origin in overwhelming truth. Where Love roots itself.
This is the underworld journey …not to bypass or escape life, but to meet life in its full, sacred, holistic, unedited intensity.
We descend to remember what we left behind in order to survive: our wildness, our vulnerability, our Soul’s honest pain, and the forgotten treaties with the living world.
The cosmology of the deep is one of reunion.
We live in a culture of exile and escapism …from the body, from the Earth and the Web of Life, from each other, from our own Souls. The “deep” is the place of original belonging, before the exile, before patriarchy.
It is not a dark pit; it is the rich, fertile humus where the seeds of the New Earth must be planted if they are to take root.
No tree grows tall without a deep, tangled, dark root system. No new world is built on the shallow soil of positive thinking, magical or wishful thinking, or escaping the Earth or the body. We go down to find the nutrients for what wants to grow above.
The ethical stance is courage in the darkness.
We agree to feel what we have been taught to avoid. We agree to be slow, to be lost, to not know. We reject the spirituality that uses “light” as a way to bypass the necessary dark. We embrace the ‘Yin’ in the eternal dance
of Yin and Yang. We understand that the most profound reorientations happen not in the glare of insight, but in the
quiet, disassembling dark of the descent, as reflected in our great and ancient mythologies.
Our loyalty shifts from the promise and immaturity of reliance upon happy endings to the integrity of the full, raw journey.
Our anchoring practice is an act of somatic remembrance.
Close your eyes. Name the loss you have never fully faced: thepersonal one, the ancestral one, the world’s loss that lives in your bones. Don’t analyse it. Let yourself feel its weight, its texture, its temperature in your body. Its sacredness and intelligence. Breathe into that place. Stay. Do not rush to fix it, reframe it or rise above it. Wait until you feel a subtle
shift. Perhaps a softening, a sigh, a small release, a recognition.
The treasure is not in overcoming the feeling, but in finally meeting it.
This practice roots the descent in the body. It moves us from story to sensation, from mind to marrow, from spirit into body. It is the apprenticeship to depth.
This transmission is a lantern for the underworld.
It does not light up the dark to make it like the day; it gives off just enough light to take the next step.
It is for when the surface world becomes unbearable, when the only honest direction is down. It is the third threshold: the willing cross into the realm of Soul-making.
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.