Psychopomp

only the shaman possesses the power of the psychopomp. For one thing, because he has traveled it many times himself, he is thoroughly familiar with the road to the underworld; then too, only he can capture the intangible soul and carry it to its new dwelling place.

Eliade establishes the psychopomp function as the shaman's exclusive competence, grounded in his repeated personal traversal of the underworld road and his unique capacity to handle disembodied souls.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis

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the shining figure of the anima, freed from the weight of the earth and the tyranny of the senses, the psychopomp who leads the way to the Elysian fields.

Jung identifies the anima as the archetypal psychopomp, a luminous guide figure that conducts the soul toward its post-mortem destination and thereby collapses the ethnographic and archetypal registers of the term.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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Not uncommonly, he is a psychopomp, an intermediary between the gods and men, and often his diabolical nature is precisely what is necessary to help initiate a new beginning.

Kalsched assigns the psychopomp role to the Trickster figure, arguing that its morally ambivalent and threshold-crossing nature is the very quality that makes it an effective initiator of transformative passages.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis

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psychopomp, 80, 136n, 221, 250 dog as, 232n Mercurius as redeeming, 237

This index entry from Alchemical Studies confirms Jung's systematic identification of Mercurius as a 'redeeming psychopomp,' marking the dog as a secondary bearer of the same function.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis

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psychopomp, 37, 133, 377

The index of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious documents the psychopomp as a recurrent technical term distributed across multiple locations in the volume, signalling its systematic rather than incidental status in Jungian theory.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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psychopomp 194, 221, 348, 351

Greene's index clusters the psychopomp with Hermes, rites of passage, and liminal mythological figures, situating the concept within the Hermetic-astrological tradition that informs her depth-psychological approach to fate.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting

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the filius macrocosmi starts from below, ascends on high, and, with the powers of Above and Below united in himself, returns to earth again. He carries out the reverse movement and thereby manifests a nature contrary to that of Christ.

Jung's account of Mercurius's bidirectional, circular movement between realms implicitly articulates the structural precondition for the psychopomp function: mastery of passage in both directions.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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nekyia, 20, 21, 46, 64, 87, 88, 151, 168f, 206; see also Descent

The Dream and the Underworld's index foregrounds the nekyia and descent as the conceptual field within which the psychopomp's guiding function operates, though the term itself is not explicitly invoked in this passage.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979aside

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