The Descent: A Jungian Exploration of the Underworld

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 Dreams and the Underworld offers a guide, linking our dreaming life to myths of the underworld.

We discuss versions of 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 that feels like a descent into hell. Such descents may become important points of initiation on our life’s journey.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel.

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(452)

Outsourcing Love: AI and Relationships

When we ask AI for advice, what we are offered is comparable to psychopathy: a performance of warm emotional intelligence without care or concern for our fate. As today’s guest Dr. Aaron Balick has wr...

1 Okt 1h 16min

Patience is Not Passivity

This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one's life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or g...

24 Sep 1h 18min

The Princess Who Changed Her Fate: How to Negotiate with Destiny

The fairy tale of the Princess Who Changed her Fate enacts what Jung tells us will happen when we remain unconscious of an inner situation: it happens outside us, as fate.Just as the princess in the s...

17 Sep 1h 18min

Inner Life, Outer World: The Psychology of Adaptation

Adaptation is a bread-and-butter concept in psychotherapy - can we accept, adjust to, and thrive in the outer and inner worlds we live in? Given constraints, what does it take to find life at least me...

10 Sep 1h 27min

Lindsay Clancy & Maternal Infanticide: An Archetypal Perspective

Lindsay Clancy has brought renewed attention to the horror of infanticide: babies and children dying at the hands of their mother. Infanticide has taken place for millennia, most often due to social p...

3 Sep 1h 30min

Goblins, Demons and Goddesses: A Conversation at the Edge of AI

OpenAI recently had to explain to frightened users why their models kept introducing goblins and gremlins into otherwise humdrum conversations. Is it possible that archetypes are emerging through the ...

27 Aug 1h 34min

The Psychology of Magic: A Jungian Exploration

Magic can be viewed as intentional engagement with what Jung called synchronicity. It is closely related to a mythological worldview, which recognizes a grand narrative supraordinate to everyday life....

20 Aug 1h 27min

In Search of the Wild Man: Befriending Bigfoot

The wild man is an enduring archetypal figure worldwide, from Enkidu in Gilgamesh, to the Greek god Pan (worshipped in glens and woods), the Green Man in England, and Bigfoot and the Sasquatch in the ...

13 Aug 1h 28min