In every culture and every religion, we find the concept of the underworld: sometimes located underground, and usually understood as a final destination after death.
This week, Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart circumambulate the notion of the underworld and what it means for us psychologically. James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld. offers a guide, linking our dreaming life to myths of the underworld.
We discuss versions of hell and the underworld in Etruscan, Mayan, Christian, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and explore how each culture envisions the threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead, and the extent to which it is possible to enter an underworld and return.
Psychologically, the underworld can represent a descent into the world of the unconscious, where completely different values apply. Awake, we may feel concerned about our job or our house, but if we listen to our dreams, we’ll often find the unconscious pointing us elsewhere, towards neglected truths or hidden desires.
A visit to the underworld can also be understood as a transformational loss of innocence, just as Kore is raped and abducted by Hades, and transforms into Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. In life, we will all experience a painful loss of innocence or an experience (such as depression, bereavement or terrible physical injury) that may feel like a descent into hell. Such descents may become important points of initiation on our life’s journey.
Here’s the dream we analyze
“My Mother’s Death” – I was somewhere in the old part of a town or a bazaar. It was nighttime and very busy. My grandmother was alive, but my mother wasn’t and when I realized I wouldn’t be able to speak to her again, full on anxiety hit me. Somehow miraculously I managed to speak to her through someone else’s phone and my mother told me she was waiting for a bus that would take her to the other side – so I had just managed to speak to her. In my dream I could see that she was OK, in a lone bus station with a brown backdrop, and I was left wondering if I would be able to call her again once she crossed over. My grandmother was sitting with me, and I also wondered how one survives the death of the child – this loss was bigger than life itself, it was a suffering that couldn’t be contained by the world. My need to speak to my mother couldn’t be held by the world either, the world was too small for it, my body was too small for it.
Resources discussed in this episode
- Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
- James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld.
- View some of the Etruscan images of the Underworld on the website of the Archeological Museum of Sarteano.
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