Descent & Rising by Carly Mountain

When our lives fall apart, we often feel broken, ashamed, and deeply alone. What if you knew that, despite the uniqueness of your own experiences, each stage of the process was universal, that it was mapped out in a myth thousands of years old?

“The heroine is one who has remembered, reclaimed, and reconnected with her unfettered red thread. She has been initiated into the spirit of the depths by her dark sister, and walks with newfound, embodied authority into the upperworld.”

What if, despite the uniqueness of your own life and experiences, each stage of the process of descent was universal? The journey of Descent & Rising is the core initiation of the feminine—the heroine’s journey—one travelled by billions of women before you.

Descent & Rising explores real stories of women’s descents into the underworld of the psyche—journeys of dissolution, grief, and breakdown precipitated by trauma, fertility issues, loss of loved ones, mental health struggles, FGM, sexual abuse, birthing experiences, illness, war, burnout, and more.

This is territory that Carly Mountain, psychotherapist and women’s initiatory guide, knows intimately, and guides us through with exquisite care and insight, using the ancient Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna as a blueprint. She maps not only the descent but the rising and familiarizes us with a process of female psycho-spiritual growth overlooked in patriarchal culture.

“The heroine’s journey is an erotic, mystical initiation that revivifies our place in the shape of things…The fodder of our descents provides the compost from which the richest fruits of our lives can grow. If only we can turn towards our pain and let it work in us.”

5.5" x 8.5", 266 pages