PERSEPHONE Goddess of the Netherworl and of Regeneration

A captivating slideshow landed on my screen with images of stepwells in India – architectural masterpieces with flights of stairs descending to a pool of water deep below the ground, and then up again, in Escher-like configurations. Built hundreds of years ago, mostly in the arid Western regions of India in the loose, sandy soil, they enabled the local population to reach the water table that is very low in months of severe drought but rises dramatically with the summer monsoons.

These steps going down to the groundwater struck my imagination though I did not yet understand why. Beyond my recognition of the stepwells as visually stunning in terms of their architecture, I sensed that these stairways into the earth evoke something much, much deeper.

I set out to photograph stepwells on two trips to India, traveling through Rajasthan, Gujarat and to Delhi. It turned out most of the stepwells required quite a lot of detective work to locate, even the rickshaw drivers had a hard time asking around. Unlike many of India’s architectural treasures, they are not on the tourist map, and many have fallen into disrepair. Still, I managed to find and photograph over twenty stepwells.

On the arid Caribbean island where I grew up, the groundwater level was always low – we had no season of monsoons. Wind-driven pumps on wells were common, and every drop of rain had to be preserved by dams, tanks, and cisterns. There were also pos di pia – “foot wells” – a slanted surface to walk down to the groundwater, but after sharing my Indian photographs, I was told that a few of these wells were also built with steps, except that the architectural splendor of the Indian monuments far surpasses the humility of those utilitarian stairways to water. On my next visit to Curaçao, I set out to photograph the island’s little-known constructions that hark back to the island’s grim slavery past.

Undoubtedly, there is a women’s element in the stepwell. It does not project itself into the air, it cannot be seen from afar, like pyramids, and phallic towers – monuments mostly erected by male rulers. The stepwell is more like an upside-down step-pyramid, except that its bulk, or volume, consists of air – an inner space, not “something to be seen”. It does not take up space – instead it makes space, allowing social gatherings and rituals to take place on its steps, as they did and still do in India.

It is significant to note that twenty-five percent of the rulers and wealthy people in historical India who commissioned stepwells for the public good as an act of piety were women, and that many of these wells were dedicated to the goddess Durga who is associated with protection and motherhood, as well as with the destruction that might be necessary before creation. The stepwell is also literally a women’s place – as women are the ones who fetch water in many traditional societies. It must be quite an effort to carry heavy buckets of water all the way up those stairs – but the shaded pavilions provide a much-appreciated opportunity for rest and socializing, breaking up the women’s often arduous daily routine.

As an erstwhile student of architecture, I have always been less interested in the visual qualities of a building than in its visceral and kinesthetic dimensions – in how you experience the space with all your senses, not only your eyes. I ask how a built environment invites you to move; what subtle sensations it arouses as you walk through its spaces; which archetypal images it awakens. And especially, how it transforms you – like a rite of initiation or a pilgrimage would.

Therefore, it was important to me to physically descend into the stepwells, to sense the architectural space from within, beyond the visual, as it was meant to be experienced. As I got closer to the water, at times on slippery steps, I realized that the stairway of the Indian stepwells continues deep down below the surface of the water, into the ghostly unknown.

Often, it was impossible to go down, not only due to the neglect and heaps of refuse, but because the Indian wells were fenced in and locked. The reasons – or rationalizations – for their being off limits to visitors played on the primal fears of these holes into the earth: two illicit couples committed suicide by jumping to their deaths in one; children were said to have drowned in others; or the place was “infested with snakes and scorpions”. The British, in their long rule of India, sealed many of the stepwells for supposed hygienic reasons, allowing these magnificent structures to fall into disuse and disrepair – and to be mostly forgotten.

The archetypal images evoked by the stepwells, in India as well as in Curaçao, speak of the journey deep into the unconscious, images studied by Jung and which the philosopher Gaston Bachelard examines in The Poetics of Space, a book that inspired my writing of House without Doors, where my twelve-year-old alter-ego goes searching for dark family secrets into the cellar of her old home, that turns into a cave leading her to an enchanted under-earth sea. Images shared by mother and son, witnessing Itamar Mendes-Flohr’s mesmerizing exhibit in the cisterns of the Hansen House.

With their long flights of stairs deep into the ground, the stepwells conjure a descent into the netherworld, the way Orpheus went down into realm of the dead, as did figures from diverse mythologies, like the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/ Ishtar, who went down, at each step peeling off another layer of her regal attire, of her old identities – as in a process of initiation – until she was completely naked. In many of these traditions, a body of water had to be crossed in this descent: the river Styx, or Averno, a lake inside an extinct volcano near Naples that was known in ancient times as the gate to the underworld.

In the Indian stepwells I photographed, those same stone steps allow you to come back safely from the depths, like Persephone who would ascend from the dark world of Hades and return to earth each spring, bringing rebirth and plenitude. When you slowly climb those steps back to the light, it is perhaps with renewed strength, with the knowledge you gain from that under-earth perspective where both Eros and Thanatos reign, where beauty and ugliness dance together. It is with what you have learned from facing your shadows, your fears, your demons, and depressions, but also from immersing yourself in the waters of the womb, reconnecting to the wellsprings of creation, of inspiration and wisdom.