Death Experience

The death experience in the depth tradition is not the biological terminus of the life but a repeating psychological phenomenon the tradition recognizes across dreams, initiations, midlife transitions, spiritual emergencies, and the work of analysis: the moment at which the existing configuration of the ego collapses and the psyche must reconstitute itself on different terms.

The classical tradition marks this under many names — the nekyia of Odysseus and of Aeneas, the descent of Inanna, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Orphic initiation into the rites of Persephone. The Renaissance alchemical corpus marks it as mortificatio — the blackening, the putrefaction, the death of the old king — the stage without which the work cannot proceed. Jungian depth psychology marks it as the dissolution of the ego-defensive structure at the threshold of individuation, and Hillman in The Dream and the Underworld reads every dream as a small rehearsal of the death experience — the ego’s nightly descent to meet the figures of its own ground. See surrender-ego-death and dream-as-underworld.

Relationships

• nekyia
• surrender-ego-death
• mortificatio