The Seba library treats Lower World in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Rohde, Erwin).
the lower world is not a mere reflection of the upper world, but that each is a world in itself.
Jung argues, via alchemical imagery, that the Lower World possesses autonomous ontological status rather than being a mere mirror or negation of the upper realm.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
the sphere to which the text later gives different names: it is called the moon and also the earth and the inferior world, the world below.
Von Franz shows how Arabic alchemical tablets conflate lunar, terrestrial, and inferior-world symbolism into a single sphere, establishing the Lower World as a composite cosmological node receiving rays from both solar configurations.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
Zeus Chthonios. This is at once the most general and the most exclusive designation of the god of the lower world; for the name 'Zeus' had in many local cults thus preserved the generalized meaning of 'god' in combination with a particularizing adjective.
Rohde locates the Lower World within Greek chthonic cult, demonstrating how euphemistic divine nomenclature veiled the terror of the underworld sovereignty under titles of beneficence.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
they banished them to the underworld. This underworld then became the model for the Christian hell, with all its monsters and the beast-like ruler at their head.
Rank argues that the Greek psycho-cultural achievement of banishing animal-matriarchal monsters to the underworld established the structural template the Christian hell would later inherit and moralize.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis
a nonphysical earth or terre pur, below or beyond and maybe prior to the ground that we touch.
Hillman distinguishes the psychological Lower World — the chthonic substrate — from literal earth, insisting on its ontological priority as a pre-physical imaginal ground.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
cold water in the lower world, xiv, ii, 151 ... Ways, Two, Three, in the lower world, xii, 62 ... Yama, Indian god of the lower world, vii, 6.
Rohde's index cross-references the Lower World across Greek, Egyptian, and Indian traditions, establishing its comparative universality as a realm of the dead with consistent topographic and ritual features.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
instead of aspiring towards perfection, 'it hovers about this lower world and the earthly nature.'
Plato employs 'this lower world' as the domain of sensory entrapment where mind, caged by the body, is perpetually drawn back from the intelligible to the material.
, Theaetetus, -369supporting
The physical being of the planet is composed from numerous worlds that in the magical tradition are called the inner worlds.
Sardello recasts the lower or inner worlds as imaginal strata constituting the physical planet itself, relocating the Lower World from beneath to within the fabric of material existence.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992aside
the sacred mountain is an axis mundi connecting earth with heaven, it in a sense touches heaven and hence marks the highest point in the world.
Eliade's axis mundi implicitly frames the Lower World as the nether terminus of the vertical cosmological axis that runs from infernal depths through earth to heaven.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside