Understanding Our Underworld Experiences: Seven Mythic Stages

In all models of the journey archetype, one of the stages is the descent into the underworld, an initiation into the dark night of the soul. It’s one of the inevitable stages of life, a stage we may enter many times over the course of a well-lived life. Death, depression, grief, loss, illness, betrayal, all manners of blows to the ego—in a long-lived life, we’ll all go there (and many of us were born there, or experienced the underworld early in life).

Though all journey models contain this stage, seldom do they discuss what it’s like down there in the underworld. Joseph Campbell’s model comes the closest to parsing out the stages within the stage, but because it’s based on the archetype of the Hero, it’s primarily about using egoic strength to overcome physical obstacles and ordeals. But what about the rest of us, smaller heroes and heroines? What’s the psychological topography of the underworld? What map can we read that helps us understand our journey?

After studying the underworld journey in cross-cultural mythology, I’ve come up with what I call “seven mythic stages” in the underworld, seven “stages of the cross,” if you will. In this Friday evening presentation, I’ll introduce each stage with a myth, and then show how it manifests in our contemporary journeys. We’ll end with the more upbeat stage, “The Gifts of the Underworld.” Where applicable, I’ll point to Jung’s stages in the underworld during his “Confrontation with the Unconscious” years (participants may want to review that chapter in Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

As time allows, we’ll also discuss our collective underworld journey, the dark night of the soul of democracy, and see how the stages apply to 2024’s civic landscape. What stage do we currently find ourselves in? Are we still in such deep darkness that we can’t begin to imagine coming out with the gifts just yet?

This presentation and Saturday’s workshop will provide a model that therapists and coaches can use with their clients, clergy and lay ministers can use with their congregants, and friends and family can use with their beloveds in order to understand and support their underworld journey. It’s useful for creatives too—for example, fiction and film writers can use it to imagine rich underworld journeys, songwriters can use it to create songs of the stages, and memoir writers can use it to name and frame their own time in the underworld. All of us can use it to more deeply understand, appreciate, and perhaps even elevate our time in the underworld.

In Saturday’s workshop, participants will be asked to choose one of their underworld journeys to work with. We’ll go through each of the seven stages again, and participants will write about their parallel experiences inside of each stage.

I don’t offer this workshop to be sadomasochistic. Quite the contrary—I offer it in the spirit of healing. In their book Opening Up By Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain, university professors James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth summarize years of research and several hundred studies that show the positive effects of “expressive writing.” As they define it, “Expressive writing is a technique where people typically write about an upsetting experience for 15 to 20 minutes a day for three or four days.” The only difference here? We’ll be writing about the underworld experience in 15 to 20 minute sessions during one day. They write, “The mere acknowledgment that the event occurred can be healing. Just labeling the actions and emotions starts to produce structure, and creates categories and order that makes sense from the writer’s perspective.”

That’s what we’ll be doing—looking at the structure of our underworld journeys, labeling our actions and emotions, and mining our experience for meaning, because, as Jung believed, “Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

But life's journey isn't solely about the underworld. It's also about those exhilarating moments atop the world's summits. We'll explore these “mountaintop” experiences too, drawing parallels with Abraham Maslow's concept of peak experiences and exploring Jung's own mountaintop moments. By writing, sharing, and examining our own peak experiences, we'll learn how to recognize and harness their archetypal power, paving the way for more such moments in our lives, bringing in the bright light we desperately need to balance the dark times we’re living in.

Note: Please bring a lunch for workshop

Trinity Church of Austin

4001 Speedway,

Austin, TX 78751

This event offers Continuing Education Units (CEUs)

Jennifer Leigh Selig, Ph.D., is a lifelong educator with 35 years of classroom experience, teaching in the fields of literature, psychology, creativity studies, and the humanities. She taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute for many of those years where she was the founding chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies doctoral program and the Engaged Humanities and Creative Life masters-degree program. Her presentation is based on a chapter from her latest book, Deep Memoir: An Archetypal Approach to Deepening Your Story and Broadening Its Appeal

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Trinity Church of Austin, 4001 Speedway, Austin, United States