The underworld journey is universal, common to all cultures, religions, people, and places. In his study of burial rites, Robert Pogue Harrison notes that the word humanity derives from the Latin humus, meaning “earth” and “bury.”3 To be human means to place parts of ourselves underground and then to enter the dark places of our world to carry out

“A psyche with few psychological ideas,” explained James Hillman, “is easily a victim.”12 To take responsibility for our lives, we need to engage imaginatively with the hurdles we encounter. Our defense against darkness is acceptance, not denial. Our power is imagination, not rigidity. Every time we bring consciousness to a situation, we become a

The underworld is the place of the unknown – the darkness, the hidden, the dead, monsters and demons, gnarly trees and cold fissures that wind deep into the earth. It’s the place where we keep the discarded parts of ourselves, those aspects of who we are that our parents, educators, society, and selves deemed unfit and unsuitable.

Whether traveling into caverns of the earth or the depths of ourselves, the underworld journey is an experience of mourning, sacrifice, unwanted and difficult experiences, danger, estrangement from the past, uncertainty, and dissolution of who we once were.

When the darkness is so raw that we’re not able to stay with it, it’s too soon for us to begin the process of change. The journey inward can be intolerable – too painful or scary for us to walk. When that’s the case, we need to pause, accept where we are, and realize that who we are right now is where we need to put our attention. For now, the

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

The ancient Greek cosmos encompassed both the dayworld and the underworld, the telluric (“upper earth”) and chthonic (“under earth”). In accord with this vision, the divine pantheon was separated into gods that belonged to the deep earth, cthonioi, such as Persephone, Hades, and Hecate, and Olympians such as Athena, Apollo, and Hera, who were of

There are times in life we lose ourselves in the dark corridors of our minds and souls, face arduous tests of character, die to what we know, and are reborn anew. In depth psychology, the journey to the underworld is a metaphor for the ego (conscious awareness) coming into contact with the unconscious (psychic contents that are inaccessible to and

Depth psychology is a psychology of darkness, a way of experiencing ourselves and life, an approach to the inner world that seeks to know what we don’t yet know about ourselves. It focuses on the source of a problem rather than alleviating (or obliterating or masking) symptoms. Its aim is to care, not cure – to dive, not repair. It explores the