The concept of a topside world and an underworld is as old as human consciousness. We have the universal experience of day and night, of light and darkness. The day-light, sunny side is associated with what we know, what we can see and what is familiar, also with rational, logic, linear thinking and planning. The nightly dark side is unknown, mysterious and equally fascinating as it is terrifying. Here we perceive with our intuitive mind, processing the surroundings in associative image-based patterns. The night-side is the world of our dreams and the source of creative ideas. This underworld has different layers of darkness, which we can associate with the moon cycles. At full moon we can perceive, often with heightened awareness, what wonders this unknown world entails, whereas the dark moon can be filled with terrors and existential danger.

Figure 1: Yin-Yang; Day and Night.

Confucius mapped this duality out as yin and yang. Modern psychology has named these two states: the conscious and the unconscious. Carl G. Jung added the term of the collective unconscious and spent a lifetime investigating the archetypal depth of this dimension, which for him was a source of universal wisdom with a reach way beyond the limitations of our immediate biography1.

Erich Neumann2, who was one of Jung’s most important colleagues, researched the global history of art over the past 5000 years and related his findings to the human development of consciousness.

Ancient mythologies mapped out these very different life-experiences as a World of the Living opposed to a World of the Dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Hades-myths of the pre-Christian Greek and Roman underworld, Dante’s Divine Comedy, are all examples of the fascination and terrors this great unknown dimension held for humans. In the Abrahamic religions the afterlife is described as either heaven or hell.

Joseph Campbell studied the world’s mythologies over the past 3000 years and published his research in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3 In his book Campbell maps out a universal pattern that all myths and fairy tales follow; we could call it: The Archetype of the Path. He co-wrote the Indiana Jones and the Star Wars Series together with George Lucas with the intention to create myths for modern children for whom the deep dark forest no longer inspires imagery of an underworld.; instead outer space became the great unknown calling for adventure. Virtually every Hollywood movie these days follows this pattern. Some of the ancient myths and fairy tales that have been passed on for centuries tell the story of the full round of transformation, others only flesh out parts and cut other aspects short. The underlying pattern, however, is the same in all of them.

Figure 2: Map of the Transformation Journey, adapted from Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The steps Campbell maps out are:

1. Home Ground as the beginning of the journey. Home ground is the world as we know it, our family, friends, home, suburb, our work and interests.

2. Waste Land is the same as home ground, however, here our daily routine has gone stale. Nothing inspires us anymore. We are just going through the moves. This is often depicted in stories as a bleak world, characterized by loneliness, suffering, poverty and despair.

3. The Call comes from somewhere unknown. It calls us to action. This could be Gandalf visiting Frodo4 , telling him about the ring. It could be the king being told his country is under threat by a dragon. It could be a dream about a princess in distress on the other end of the world

4. Following the Call can be a time of great procrastination, because we know, that setting off on the journey will change everything. It will be dangerous and challenge irrefutably everything we have achieved in life so far, and yet, we have to go. We have to leave the familiar world behind and set off on a journey of unknown outcome. The reasons why we set off are also hard to communicate to the ones left behind, because there is high risk and an intangible, often monumental task ahead.

5. The Threshold is a marked event. Now, there is no return. The entrance to the Other World is frequently guarded by monsters representing our fears, or a mysterious ferryman, who takes his passengers across the river Styx into the underworld. Alice falls into the Wonderland through a rabbit hole, Hansel and Gretel are misled into the forest, others are lured by mermaids into the sea.

6. The Road of Trials and Tribulations maps out the challenges along the way, which tend to be characterized by that nothing is like what it seems to be; the flashy, beautiful White Witch in the Narnia5 story turns out to be evil, whereas the helpers tend to be humble and at first sight insignificant. Ego-driven attitudes, logic and pride fail on this path in the underworld. Often it is the seemingly stupid one, who is humble enough to listen to his intuition, taking advice from birds and trees in order to find the way. There is no middle class in the underworld! Protagonists are either royal and super powerful or desperately poor.

7. Transformation happens at the darkest and deepest point. This supreme ordeal is always life-threatening, yet unfolds as a surrender. It is not successful due to an egobased victory, because whatever we face at this point is infinitely more powerful than any human individual. Transformation occurs through an alignment of forces, and an existential allowing to be. It marks a death and a rebirth. The treasure found at this stage allows the hero to emerge more whole and complete. In Jungian terms the ego surrenders to the Self as the eternal, wholistic core. This is the point where the dragon is slayed and transformed into gold or a princess, when the tested and tried couple marries and is “happy forever after”, when Frodo surrenders the ring into Modor’s Cracks of Doom, when the witch is dead and Hansel and Gretel discover her wealth or a mystical child is born. Transformation marks a full and complete turn-around of whatever struggles the previous drama entailed.

8. The Boon describes the part of the journey, where the transformation that has occurred needs to be safe-guarded. This is either a blessed and guided journey back home, or marked by challengers chasing the hero, wanting to claim the found treasure as their own. King Herod feared the loss of his power and ordered every male child to be killed, which prompted Mary’s and Joseph’s Flight to Egypt. The Handless Maiden was chased by the devil, even after she had married the king.

9. The Return marks the reentry into the topside world, back to Home Ground. The hero will bring back a treasure that will change the world such as the Holy Grail containing the Water of Life. However, the return is also an anticlimax, because while we underwent a magical, bone-chilling journey in a mysteriously timeless, shimmering and fluid dimension below the horizon, nothing has changed on the topside, and the had adventure is impossible to share in a two-dimensional world that only knows a language of black and white.

In Joseph Campbell's language of myths, initiates have to descend into the unknown, they have to return to a symbolic cosmic womb in order to retrieve lost, dissociated or unknown aspects of their personality. They have to die into the underworld as into a tomb and reunite with the supernatural in order to become complete. In the process they will rediscover a primordial unity that they once experienced. The Threshold guardians at the gate of the transpersonal realm, pictured throughout mythology, have the function of testing the adept and frightening away all those whose conscious powers are not yet strong enough.

Paradoxically, they will make sure that whoever reenters the father-womb or mother-womb for renewal is capable of surviving death and all other ordeals. Paradoxically, the more successful we are in the world, the more demanding the inner voice becomes. Initiation happens at that point when, as C. G. Jung would put it, the ego finally hears the calling of the Self. Moreover, the ego is submitted for a moment to the power and glory of the Self. Such an initiation will give the individual a glimpse of the inner world beyond time and space.

Some liken this process to a spiritual initiation, for others it represents the ordeal of the creative process. In therapy the journey is about soul retrieval, as often this means opening long-closed doors that hold terrors of the past.

Every path leading towards spiritual realisation requires of us that we strip off our ordinary and habitual ‘I’. This death of the ego has a voluntary aspect, but it cannot be willed or made. The key quality of this initiation experience is the loss of personal will power, the surrender of control. It does not occur without the sacrifice of visible riches and empty pretensions, not without humiliation, and not without struggle against the passions of which the old ‘I’ is woven. This is the reason why so many heroic protagonists are poverty-stricken and appear as beggars or servants in rags, performing low tasks.

The journey that follows is uncompromising: a paradox designed to expand a limiting perspective on life. We are plunged into the totality of an adventure with no way out, similar to the sailors of the vessels of Columbus, who broke through the horizon of the mediaeval mind. They sailed, as they thought, into the boundless ocean of immortal being that surrounds the cosmos like an endless serpent biting its tail – and had to be cozened and urged on like children, because of their fear of fabled leviathans, mermaids, dragon kings and other monsters of the deep.6

Fear and fascination of the unknown will activate a timeless dimension of archetypal depth and vivid, strangely fluid dreamscapes. Fear will make us feel small, like little children, while the strange other is charged with supernatural parental powers. The history of mankind is a rich source of myths, legends and fairy tales that illustrate the many facets and possible aspects of the journey. They are reports of heroes and heroines who travelled to the end of the night and came back transformed. Analytical psychology has documented extensively how these heroic passages translate into the therapeutic environment, how the themes manifest themselves in dreams, visions and clients’ artwork.

The crossing of the threshold is characterised by a symbolic death. This can be social death, a severe identity crisis or physical breakdown. It can be an event such as divorce, unemployment, postnatal depression or hospitalisation. An unfaithful lover can cause “crucifixion” or “dismemberment”. Emotional pain and abandonment will push us over the brink, onto the rolling waves of the night-sea journey. Here one-by-one our resistances is broken. We must put aside pride, virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.7

Figure 3: The Descent

Passing through the threshold, one leaves the known, the homeland. The driving force is the need for rejuvenation or transformation. Something in the life of the initiate has gone stale, come to an end, been outgrown. There is always a call, a pull, a yearning, a warning. And, in answering the call, one is faced with what is most feared. In the tale of Bluebeard, the threshold is represented by the one door in the castle that the young wife is not allowed to open. Once her curiosity takes over and she uses the forbidden key and enters, hell breaks loose. She is confronted with the dark family secrets, the murdered ex-wives, the predatory shadow-world of her husband’s wealth. Still, she is willing to sacrifice comfort and material security for a more complete, realistic life, even if it takes all her skill and cunning to survive the horrors of truth. Most importantly, she is determined not to be “nice” and “sweet” and well-behaved any more, but to claim her own creative power.8

Figure 4: The Return

In the context of the creative process, it may have become clear by now that during the time of descent into the underworld not much energy is left for the topside. While we undergo dramas and lifethreatening challenges in the Land of the Dead, our normal working and social life might lack spark, money, structure and logic; some may call it ‘depressed’. This is why many artists cherish writing retreats, so they can fully focus on their subterranean adventure, without having to perform the ordinary tasks of daily living. What might look like the grey, lazy or underperforming Wasteland from the topside perspective, can represent a Call to Adventure. We undergo these trips to the underworld many times over. Some of these journeys are shorter, others take years. Not for nothing mythology advises that only heroes are fit for the challenges. It is important not to get lost, not to forget our purpose, to follow the rules that work for us, because the task is to return, to bring back the water of life, to tame the supernatural so it can become the medicine that will revive and renew the world.

References:

1 (Jung 1990)

2 (Neumann 1955; 1963; seventh paperback printing 1991)

3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand faces, Harper Collins, 1993 (Campbell 1949/1993)

 4 (Tolkin 1968) 5 (Lewis 2008)

6 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 78.

7 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 108

8 Bluebeard in Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women who Run with the Wolves, London, Rider, 1992, pp. 39-73.

New Online Course

Heaing Artist Block; Connecting with your creative flow

This 23 April 2020 we are proud to announce the release of a new online course "Healing Artist Block: Connecting with your creative flow". This timely tutorial teaches a number of applicable exercises for times when you feel stuck, and are overthinking ideas. How can you emerge from frustration and depression and reconnect with your inner flow? The course is vividly illustrated with filmed case histories and has been designed not only for artists, but for anyone who wants to find that inner 'flow'-state of creativity. 

Taking elements of healing from our course "Healing Trauma with Guided  Drawing" and incorporating methods from Sensorimotor Art Therapy practice, Cornelia Elbrecht brings to you a beautiful process of creative release.

The Transformation Journey

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Three weeks of training with Cornelia Elbrecht

This training has been designed for therapists to offer them Guided Drawing® intervention tools that are body-focused, trauma-informed and primarily non-verbal.

The Transformation Journey is a certified course suitable for both new students wishing to gain an introduction into the Guided Drawing® modality, and past students familiar with Healing Trauma with Guided Drawing® wishing to deepen their knowledge of the modality.

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