A mythic plunge over a waterfall marks the beginning of an intense physical and psychological initiation for the character Jake Sulley in the 2009 science fiction film Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron. Jake is part of a military guard for a mining corporation which is harvesting a prized mineral on a distant planet. The colonisers have named this place Pandora and there are many dangers for humans including wild beasts and poisonous air.
On his first mission into the rainforest Jake gets separated from a scouting party when he is chased by a giant, predatory, panther-like creature. Running for his life, he ends up half falling, half jumping over a huge and thundering waterfall.
Surviving his descent into the deep plunge pool, he surfaces to find himself alone and lost in a mysterious and hostile jungle. Night is fast approaching. Jake’s experiences from this point in the story onwards gradually break down all his pre-conceived ideas about nature, survival and relationships. This sets him on a path where eventually, he finds himself to be a sacred part of the Great Mother’s web.
Watery surfaces are often the places where worlds meet in mythology and in our own lives. The legendary Ffynone Waterfall in Pembrokeshire in Wales is known to be a doorway to Annwn, an ethereal parallel world of constant delights. Water blurs the boundaries between seen and unseen realms by softening the hard edges of the material world. It magnetises us to stay and be enchanted, stilling our constantly moving thoughts and enabling us to enter more fluid and relational states. As we let go into this mesmerising, right-brain state, we may sense the more subtle elements of the spirit world around us.
These are some stages of the waterfall’s pull on our soul’s yearnings. Firstly, we are in the stream of life but becoming aware that there is an ending up ahead. If we follow this stream, we will find the flow ends suddenly with a cataclysmic plunge into the unknown. From this fall, there is a descent of the soul from which there will be no chance of return to what life was before. When following the flow of life, there may be quiet, backwater times but this is a hiatus moment. We are on a one-way ticket by this point, whether we like it or not.
Within the calm at the head of the falls we are magnetised to continue moving with the flow, inevitably, destined now to go. We reach the point where we let go or are compelled to. We leave all we know behind and are at the mercy of the water’s gravity. We are off the chartered map and free-falling. This point is pure and absolute surrender. Like the point of death. Falling now, at the mercy of gravity we have become the flow. Shedding old skins, our sense of self has gone too. Our atoms are consumed by the water.
This too then comes to an end. Our fall is stopped by water. We enter the deep pool of forgetting. A new immersion in a womb-like space that is shaped by the power of the relentless water pouring down. Bubbles, brightness, the presence of the cascading water is immense. A pounding rhythm thrums through body and soul. Such a downwards pull. The descent into a new power is palpable.
Now, rising free of the tugging whirlpool, an endless destructive vortex circling, we are breathing new air, lung-fuls of it to calm the shock. As we look around we find we have fallen into another world.
The waterfall has changed us and we cannot go back. There has been an ending to old ways of experiencing, now a new chapter begins. Initiation brings a new type of power, strength and awareness. The gifts bestowed on us will be called upon. We must pick ourselves up and go on.
References
Avatar film (2009). 20th Century Studios.
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