All historic Asiatic mystery cult initiation rites can be traced to the "rite of the dark descent" of the shaman-sorcerer of the Paleolithic fertility cult. The parallels are evident.
The descent into the Paleolithic cave-temple site at Altamira is especially steep and dangerous. Weston La Barre in his "Ghost Dance" remarked on the dangerously steep, precipitate of the drop into the Altamira "womb of the Earth."
The evidence is that the initiation rite of dark descent, in the mother-goddess fertility cult, is of prehistoric antiquity. What is the mystical-philosophical significance of the "dark passage?" We have only the mystery cults of the Asiatic mother goddess of the Ancient world to guide us.
In the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the ritual of the "dark descent" is directly referred to, each initiate into the cult was offered the prospect of divinity in direct union with the mother. In the ritual of "dark descent" the "cysta mystica" ("sacred box"), acknowledged as a womb symbol held an image of the womb which the applicant slipped over his body. In the ceremony of removing the image of the womb and returning it into the "sacred box" was symbolized the initiate's assurance of safe return from the "womb of the Earth," after the perilous descent. In the ritual of the descent, the womb represented the Ancient Near East concept of "Hades," the dark, gloomy abode of the dead, from which the "initiate," as a special case (being an inductee into the privileged cult of The Mother) expected "safe delivery" back to life.
The preceding facts summarize the significance of the ritual of "dark descent," as the symbolic enactment of death (in return-to-womb terms of understanding) with the subsequent "ascent" being enactment of the return-to-life(resurrection). The ritual, in its essence, thus symbolized the believer's hope of mastery of death (and fear of death)in divine death-rebirth cycle of immortality.
In the Phrygian mystery cult, the Eleusinian equation of the "dark descent" with the descent to "Hades" is made plainer, though with stronger womb-delivery symbolism. The initiate descends into a dug grave, and to the accompaniment of magical incantations, the blood of a slaughtered bull is poured over him. At his "ascent," a ceremony is conducted in which he is worshiped as a god(having overcome the power of the grave in resurrection). He receives milk nourishment as a new born god-child.
But more important to the Paleolithic cultists, judging from the evidence of their subterranean art activity was the concept of the underworld as "womb of origins." The observation by the Neolithic farmer that all vegetation grows from the earth (and crops too, after the seed is buried as in death) was significant and from it flowed the mystical-philosophical conclusion of the Hadean underworld as some form of subterranean factory-workshop of a cosmic creative artistic Ego which the shaman-sorcerer stood for in his person!
The mother-goddess mystical union of the creature-organism and the environment as Cosmic All was a symbiosis to creative ends. In union with the maternal All, the sorcerer assumed the role of cosmic "deus artifex" (God as creator). But before exultation to divine status must come the dreaded dark descent; his initiation into the maternal All-Womb could only be by a fearsome descent of death or deathlike experience through the constricting All-Vagina of death throe (equivalent in Rankian psychoanalytic terms to the Birth Trauma).
Thus, we find in the Paleolithic religion an attempt by man overcome his fear of death by re-interpretation of the apparent fact of death annihilation as strictured passage into the wide plains of an afterlife world. It is, however, important to emphasize that in its origin in Paleolithic culture, as in the late historic Asiatic cult of The Mother, the prospect of afterlife was the exclusive privilege of the initiate into the mysteries of the mother-goddess cult. In its constitution, the Paleolithic fertility cult typically had only one male member in an exclusively female political power cult. The group was represented in terms of a female organic whole with penis("woman with penis"), the ""male member" of the cult being the child-penis figure as popularized in the historic traditions of Madonna and Son.
This peculiar constitution of the Paleolithic fertility cult would be preserved in the Celtic Nature cult in which a single male member stood at the center of the rituals of the female "Witch Coven," and came to be identified in Christian tradition with the Devil himself.
The writer JohnThomas Didymus is the author of "Confessions of God: The Gospel According to St. JohnThomas Didymus." (http://www.resurrectionconspiracy.com/). If you have found this article interesting you are invited to read the article PAULINE THEOLOGY AND MOTHER GODDESS CULT MYSTICISM http://johnthomasdidymus.blogspot.com/2010/10/pauline-theology-and-mother-goddess.html
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