The Netherworld, as it appears across the depth-psychology corpus, functions neither as mere geographical terminus nor as theological afterthought, but as a structurally necessary psychic region whose logic differs categorically from the upper world of waking consciousness. Hillman’s archetypal psychology provides the most sustained treatment, explicitly distinguishing the netherworld from the chthonic earth of Demeter and from the night-world, situating it as the domain of Hades — a realm governed by image, necessity, and the dead — and indexing it throughout his underworld hermeneutic as the mythological ground for dream interpretation. Campbell, drawing on Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek material, demonstrates the netherworld’s ritual function: it is the locus of stripping, descent, and regenerative return, paradigmatically in Inanna’s passage through the seven gates. Neumann situates it within the darker valences of the Great Mother archetype, linking netherworld deities to fate goddesses and the Erinyes. Hillman further observes that in Egypt the netherworld’s inhabitants were black, and in Rome were called umbrae — a detail that opens toward the shadow. Herman’s clinical usage is notably displaced, deploying the term metaphorically to characterize a compromised investigative space. The term thus traverses cosmological, mythological, ritual, and psychological registers, consistently marking a domain of depth, transformation, and the sovereignty of death.