Hercules personifies fighting the underworld and resisting its wisdom, and he also represents the strength needed to overcome the destructive power of the unconscious – to tame Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of Hades. It takes profound courage, willpower, and determination to face unconscious content, turn toward our traumas and our embodied

The inner capacity to sacrifice stability and comfort in order to pursue self-growth is heroic.

In this way, the hero’s path conducts people “across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life.”

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a detailed study of the archetypal pattern of the hero. By distilling a wealth of cross-cultural myths and combining culturally specific hero traits, he identified archetypal phases of the hero’s journey, calling it the monomyth of the hero.12

All previous ages of human history believed in gods of some form. “Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism,” argued Hillman, “could enable us to rediscover gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious.”10 Jung called this impoverishment of symbolism a Kairos, an opportune moment for the gods to metamorphize from

Depth psychology arose in the 19th century as a response to the religious, scientific, and personal changes in the Western mind and way of life. Reacting to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on empiricism, individualism, and reason, depth psychology sought to balance exploration of the inner world with scientific inquiry. It used the methodology of the

“The hero myth,” psychologist Keiron Le Grice explains, “carries the individualism of the West to its logical conclusion, fulfilling the Western spiritual ideal, leading the individual self to its own transformation through the inner encounter with the depths of the psyche and spirit.”7 Adapting the character of the Western mind and culture, the

Life is filled with movements of descending and ascending. The Greeks called ascending palingenesia, “the recurrence of birth.” We never fully ascend from the underworld. We’re in a constant process of descending followed by integrating, and each roundtrip affects the rest of our lives.

“The realm of the ancient gods,” Walter F. Otto wrote, “is always tangential to the religion of the dead; in that, indeed, life is a sibling of death.”