Egyptian Underworld

Aker means not only the moment, but also the place and situation, the situation of death and resurrection, of yesterday and tomorrow, of the resurrection and regeneration of the sun god.

Von Franz identifies Aker as the pivotal Egyptian underworld symbol — simultaneously temporal threshold and spatial locus — marking the enantiodromia of death into rebirth, which she reads as the alchemical and psychological ‘night sea journey.’

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis

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The night journey of the Sun God through the underworld is depicted in the Amduat, which has been seen as symbolic process of transformation.

Jung frames the Egyptian Amduat’s solar night journey as the primary mythological template for the psychological process of transformation, connecting the battle with Apophis to the ego’s struggle against the grip of the unconscious.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis

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the underworld really came alive in the pyramids. The deeper you descended, the more vibrant became the colors along the wall, and then a bright, maybe red, mythical serpent appears on the wall wending down toward the sarcophagus.

Russell documents how Hillman’s direct encounter with Egyptian funerary architecture provoked the central insight of his archetypal psychology — that descent into the Egyptian underworld paradoxically moves toward, rather than away from, life.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis

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The underworld, the earth womb, as the perilous land of the dead through which the deceased must pass, either to be judged there and to arrive at a chthonic realm of salvation or doom, or to pass through this territory to a new and higher existence, is one of the archetypal symbols of the Terrible Mother.

Neumann establishes the Egyptian underworld as the archetypal expression of the Terrible Mother — an earth-womb of judgment and potential rebirth that structures the nocturnal sea voyage of sun and hero alike.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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the devourer of the dead is the Terrible Mother of death and the underworld, though not in her splendid original form. She is ‘repressed’ and crouches beside the judgment scales like a horror.

Neumann reads Am-mit, the Egyptian underworld’s devourer of the unworthy dead, as a psychologically repressed form of the Terrible Mother, displaced from sovereign status to crouching horror beside the scales of judgment.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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Each dead person, according to Egyptian belief, becomes the god Osiris, the hidden god of the underworld, not in some invisible way or in the way of an analogy, but through the actual concrete operations of the mummification of the corpse.

Von Franz argues that Egyptian funerary practice literalizes what depth psychology treats symbolically — the concrete alchemical transformation of the dead body into Osiris enacts a material deification that collapses the distinction between substance and divinity.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

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When you go into the underworld in the hour of darkness, you wake up Osiris with your rays. When you rise over the heads of the inhabitants of the hollows (the Dead) they shout to you.

Rank cites the Egyptian Book of the Dead to establish the underworld as the nocturnal domain of the sun god whose passage through it enacts the regeneration of the dead, which Rank links to his broader theory of birth-trauma and return fantasies.

Rank, Otto, The Trauma of Birth, 1924thesis

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In Amente, the Egyptian underworld, dwells the great seven-headed snake, and in the Christian underworld is the most celebrated snake of all, the devil, ‘that old serpent.’

Jung traces the serpent of the Egyptian underworld through Christian demonology and Germanic mythology, treating Amente’s seven-headed snake as one node in a cross-cultural symbolic chain linking underworld, death, and the devouring unconscious.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting

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Unlike other principal organs, the heart was not eviscerated in the preparation of the Egyptian mummy for the underworld but left in the cadaver.

Hillman draws on the Egyptian funerary exemption of the heart from evisceration to ground his archetypal psychology of the heart’s intelligence, locating Egyptian underworld practice as evidence for the heart’s irreducible psychological primacy.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting

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the dead were given the chance to guard against the fearful serpent mn in the hereafter. ‘Here, it is true, the mAn is not only defeated, but killed, and there is no further question of its teeth.’

Rank examines Egyptian underworld board-games as evidence that the dead faced the same existential perils in the afterlife as in earthly existence, connecting serpent-combat mythology to the Horus-Seth duality of brother-enemies.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting

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Egyptian mythology is an exception to this formulation, because certain aspects are inverted; thus, as far as sexual symbolism is concerned, the heavens above are feminine and the earth below is masculine.

Von Franz identifies the Egyptian cosmological inversion — feminine sky above, masculine earth below — as a structural exception within comparative mythology, explaining it through Egypt’s distinctive valorization of afterlife over earthly existence.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

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‘Together with Osiris’–this is a promise that the soul shall be the deathless companion of the creator. The idea already in being passes beyond the next world; it is an eschatological answer that holds a promise of perpetuity even when the world has reverted to the uroboric state.

Neumann reads the Atum-Osiris dialogue as Egypt’s eschatological answer to death — not merely an afterlife continuation but a promise of psychic perpetuity beyond cosmic dissolution, marking a decisive shift from material to spiritual transformation.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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The motif of the journey to the other world, the sea journey at night, is not only familiar in all the religious traditions of the nations of both East and West, but also agrees without exception on each of the essential points.

Banzhaf situates the Egyptian underworld journey within a universalized comparative framework of the hero’s night-sea passage, treating descent and return as the structural axis of all cross-cultural eschatological imagination.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000aside

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Osiris wears the Afef-crown with horns and holds before him the Las-scepter, flagellum, and shepherd’s crook. Horus, facing his father and Serapis, has behind him his four sons.

Campbell offers iconographic detail of the Egyptian underworld’s divine hierarchy — Osiris as lord of the resurrected dead, flanked by Horus and his four sons — as evidence of the solar-death mythology underlying Egyptian funerary symbolism.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974aside

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In funerary scenes, the ba is usually depicted as a small humanoid bird, probably because visual hallucinations often have flitting and birdlike movements.

Jaynes approaches the Egyptian funerary soul-concept (ba) through his bicameral mind hypothesis, reading the ba’s visual manifestations in underworld scenes as projections of auditory hallucination rather than theological doctrine.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside

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