The cavern occupies a peculiarly rich position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as topographical fact, ritual site, and inner psychological landscape. Campbell’s readings of Paleolithic cave art establish the literal cave as the first mythogenetic zone, where the physical darkness of limestone chambers evoked, as he puts it, ‘the latent energies of that other cave, the unfathomed human heart.’ Jung carries this correspondence inward, reading the spelaeum—the initiatory cave—as an archetype of death-and-rebirth, linking Mithraic crypts, the Holy Sepulchre, and Hecate’s underground sanctuary along a single axis of transformation: descent into the maternal darkness followed by psychic regeneration. Rohde documents the Greek subterranean megaron, the chasm-chamber where chthonic spirits dwell in serpent form, as the sacrificial locus mediating between the living and the dead. Hillman, characteristically oblique, treats the cavern as the memory-treasury, the thesaurus of the psyche, entered not by heroic will but by the spontaneous pressure of images. Vernant illuminates the Greek muchos—the cavern-recess—as structurally homologous with the feminine interior, the thalamos, and the underworld alike. Evans-Wentz notes Irish purgatorial caves as surviving sites of pagan mystic initiation. Across these voices the cavern marks the threshold between surface consciousness and chthonic depth, between ego-time and mythic time.