Entering the 'House of Darkness': Ancient Practices of Incubation & Renewal
Or what the dark gives us
We’re deep into autumn now here in the Northern Hemisphere. The nights stretch long and the mornings remain cloaked in darkness, though daylight savings will soon shift our clocks forward. With this seasonal shift comes a primal urge to rest, to lie in bed for hours on end, as though preparing to enter the quiet, shadowed spaces within ourselves. This year, I feel that urge more strongly, and something in me longs to obey it—a pull toward incubation in darkness, much like the wisdom seekers of ages past.
In ancient Greece, there is evidence of incubation in the dark as a practice. In his book, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kingsley shares how ancient wisdom traditions involved periods of seclusion, silence, and darkness where practitioners sought direct experience and insight beyond intellectual understanding. He traces the roots of these practices to Southern Italy and Greece, where initiates engaged in incubation to access deeper knowledge, healing, or prophecy.
Kingsley's work presents these early, pre-Socrates philosophers like Parmenides and Empedocles as figures who bridged rational thought with experience of mystical practices. His overarching thesis is that their wisdom was not merely intellectual but practical, grounded in embodied knowledge attained through these dark, introspective journeys.
Bards in the Western Highlands of Scotland practiced the Celtic tradition of incubating a poem in the dark up until the 17th century. This practice was sometimes called imbas forosnai, or “illumination that enlightens.” Poet-masters assigned a topic to their students, after which students would go into the “house of darkness.” There they lay in the dark, seeing nothing, having no communication, sometimes with a large stone on their stomachs to keep them awake, waiting for the poems, imagery, and metaphor to make themselves known.
Echoes of this practice can be found all over the world. Tibetan Buddhist monks, for example, undergo dark retreats to cultivate profound meditative states and insight into the nature of consciousness. In ancient Egypt, seekers lay in temple chambers dedicated to gods of healing, awaiting dreams that would bring guidance or spiritual healing, while Daoist practitioners withdrew into caves to connect with their life force and achieve inner union through darkness. In some Sufi traditions, practitioners isolate themselves in khalwa, a darkened retreat space, to transcend ego and connect with divine presence. Early Christian monks and mystics retreated into caves or desert cells, sometimes living in near-total darkness for years as a means to still the mind, quiet the senses, and experience union with God.
In shamanic cultures, darkness also serves as a gateway to other realms and an initiation. Amazonian shamans undergo rituals in dark huts, combining darkness with fasting or plant medicines to enter visionary states that connect them to the spirit world. Saami shamans from Northern Europe often employ darkness and drumming to enter trance states, using these altered perceptions to heal and receive guidance from otherworldly realms.
Across these cultures, darkness is more than an absence of light—it is a powerful catalyst for inward journeying, wisdom, and connection with forces beyond what we can see.
This is not a metaphorical phase of incubation, where you let an idea, thought or experience settle into the psyche and do its work. This is an act of renunciating light for a time and surrendering the body, mind, and soul to the dark—to the underworld—to gain a kind of understanding that is not accessible to the mind alone.
Of course, in our always-on, 24/7, go-go-go world, we in the West no longer have these practices readily available to us (although there are a few places that offer darkness retreats: this one in Oregon, and this one in Kansas City). We have to construct our own—or be forced into it.
A bout with illness is its own retreat. The second time I had COVID I was isolated in my bedroom away from my family. Although I lacked pitch-blackness, it was no less a descent into a deep understanding of the version of my business at the time, and the fact that it was no longer viable on several levels. Years before that, I fell ill with a nasty flu and spent days in darkness, during which I went into what I could only describe as a trance that showed me some of the darkest parts of myself, parts that were begging to be acknowledged and worked with.
I’ve always wondered: did those visions and understandings come because I was sick? Or did I get sick because I would not make space for the visions and understandings, and so the universe forced me to go ground?
The onset of darkness that stretches on for hours is a good time to consider going into the underworld to receive whatever messages might be waiting. You might notice it as a tug. You might notice it as a stagnation—something in life has grown old and stale, and although you sense something is off, you can’t locate the source. Perhaps there’s a melancholy or an antsiness and you cannot name the source. These are all good signs that something begs your attention, and what’s calling is probably deep in your personal underworld, a place that can’t be accessed through the mind or analyzation.
If you hear that call, consider ways to create your own incubation—take a period of time with no external communication. Exist in darkness for a full day and a night. Sit in silence with yourself and allow things to bubble up. Find a way to make space for those understandings that arise. As Joseph Campbell said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” Only in darkness can some truths rise to the surface; those insights transform our path forward.
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Hello, darkness my old friend…