The Underworld occupies a foundational position within the depth-psychological corpus, functioning not merely as mythological backdrop but as a primary ontological category for the psyche itself. Hillman's sustained engagement — above all in The Dream and the Underworld (1979) — establishes the governing framework: Hades is not an eschatological afterlife but a present, co-extensive dimension of psychic reality, contiguous with daily life and constituting its depth, telos, and shadow-brother. For Hillman, the critical theoretical move is distinguishing the underworld (a realm of pure images, eidola, essences) from the underground (the vital, biological, emotional subsoil identified with Dionysian or Demeter energies). This distinction carries significant hermeneutic consequences for dreamwork. Freud and Jung are implicated in this genealogy: Freud's topographical unconscious inherits the mythological underworld's invisibility and negative description; Jung's descent figures (Nekyia, night-sea journey) are mapped onto analogous territory by von Franz and others. Rohde and Kerényi provide classical-scholarly grounding for the soul's fate below. Estés, Berry, and Padel extend the territory: Estés links feminine descent to the Persephone-Demeter cycle as initiatory necessity; Berry recovers the underworld as Gaia's original realm of insubstantial images; Padel illuminates Greek overdetermination of underworld darkness with the imaginal interior of the female body. The abiding tension in the corpus is between the underworld as a place of irreversible fixity — incurable souls, unchanging psychopathic complexes — and as a transformative initiatory space.
The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later. It is not a far-off place of judgment over our actions but provides that place of judging now, and within, the inhibiting reflection interior to our actions.
Hillman's central thesis: the underworld is a present, interior psychological dimension coextensive with life, not a post-mortem destination, identified with the telos of every soul process.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Because the underworld differs so radically from the underground, that which has its home there, dreams, must refer to a psychic or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones. These are invisible by nature, and not merely invisible because they have been forgotten or repressed.
Hillman draws a decisive distinction between the underworld of pure psychic essences and the underground of biological vitality, grounding his entire hermeneutics of dream imagery in this differentiation.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
We may speak of eidola only as they 'seem,' 'appear to be,' or what they 'liken unto.' Our statements must be prefixed by an 'as,' as if that little word is the coin we offer Charon for taking us across the separating waters between two kinds of speech.
Hillman establishes that the underworld's inhabitants — eidola — require a mode of speech defined by semblance rather than substance, marking a fundamental epistemological shift in psychological discourse.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
The less underworld, the less depth, and the more horizontally spread out becomes one's life. The materialistic view ends in a kind of void, the very Halls of Hades now only a spiritual vacuum, for its myths and images have been called irrational simulacra.
Hillman argues that cultural suppression of the underworld imagination produces depersonalization and pervading depression, making depth psychology's reconnection with this realm a quasi-religious function.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair. They cancel each other out; and we can move beyond the language of expectations, measuring progressions and regressions, ego strengthening and weakening, coping and failing.
Hillman locates the Hades level of dreaming beyond the ego's developmental calculus, characterizing the underworld as a domain indifferent to therapeutic progress or regress.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Mythology recognized these lacunae in the continuity of ground underfoot, these caves and holes, as entrances to the underworld. Furthermore, like the classical underworld, the unconscious receives mainly a negative description, because by definition it is invisible and not directly knowable.
Hillman maps Freud's topographical unconscious onto classical underworld mythology, demonstrating that psychoanalytic theory inherits and secularizes ancient imaginal geography.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
Death is not the background to dreamwork, but soul is. Soul, if immortal, has more to it than dying, and so dreams cannot be limited to attendance upon death.
Hillman resists the literalization of death as the governing horizon of dreamwork, proposing instead that the soul's underworld perspective constitutes a shift in consciousness irreducible to mortality.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
Such figures are fulltime inmates of the underworld. In dreams, we meet them as killers, nazis, and as crooks with beguiling charm.
Hillman proposes that psychopathic dream figures represent an unchanging underworld essence — beyond moral transformation — that must be engaged through archetypal rather than therapeutic categories.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
the souls in Hades are incurable (Gorgias 525e). They do not change. We have come to call this essential aspect of the complex that is beyond morality and change 'psychopathy,' yet here is p
Drawing on Plato's Gorgias, Hillman argues that the underworld's defining characteristic is ontological fixity — certain soul-conditions are constitutionally beyond moral change or therapeutic redemption.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
Christianism, in a two-sided masterstroke, both did away with the underworld and horrified it as the perpetual alternative to the Christian path. Christianism or underworld: one had to choose, and who would choose the horror?
Hillman identifies Christianity's dual strategy — elimination and demonization of the underworld — as the primary cultural barrier separating Western modernity from authentic depth-psychological engagement.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
This concern with depth leads us in practice to pay special attention to whatever is below... burials, the dead, ancestors; workers in refuse, sewers, plumbers; criminals and outcasts; the lower body, its garments and its functions.
Hillman catalogs the imagistic phenomenology of underworld depth in clinical material, connecting suppression, shadow, and the chthonic with the full range of images that signal descent into psychic depth.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
In the time of the great matriarchies, it was understood that a woman would naturally be led to the underworld, guided there and therein by the powers of the deep feminine. It was considered part of her instruction, and an achievement of the highest order for her to gain this knowledge through firsthand experience.
Estés frames the feminine descent to the underworld as an initiatory necessity encoded in ancient matriarchal understanding, linking the Persephone-Demeter archetype to the deepest feminine psychology.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The mother's depths are the underworld. Gaia's original realm included both the upper realm of growth, nurturance, and life and the underworld realm of death, limitation, and ending.
Berry recovers the underworld as originally Gaia's own domain, arguing that the earth-mother archetype encompasses both generative and mortuary dimensions in a unified chthonic imagination.
, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting
Those who die enter the covered underworld, a darkness. Dying souls 'leave the light,' enter 'dark lifetime' on 'dark plains.' Tartarus is bordered by a bronze fence, a three-lapped necklace of night 'shed' round it.
Padel documents the Greek poetic overdetermination of underworld darkness with death, covering, and fluid nonseeing, establishing the phenomenological texture of Homeric underworld imagery.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
In male perceptions, women's inwardness merges the underworld, unseen recess of the world outside human beings, with the inner world, unseen recess within. Greek ideas of femaleness link the flux, darkness, magico-prophetic powers, and fertility of the innards with those of the underworld, earth, and night.
Padel demonstrates how Greek thought conflates the female interior body with the underworld, creating a gendered imaginal topology in which both share darkness, fertility, and prophetic power.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
the descent into the unconscious has always been thought of as a descent into that other world, a reestablishment of the lost connections with the dead. A very good example is in Homer, where Ulysses descends into the underworld, and the blood of the sacrificed sheep makes the ghosts so real that they can speak.
Jung equates psychological descent into the unconscious with the ancient mythological descent to the underworld, using Homer's Nekyia as the paradigmatic model for psychic engagement with the dead.
, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting
it is the entrance to the Beyond, the limen, or the deepest point in the underworld itself... the moment when the sun reappears after its journey through the underworld, i.e., the rebirth of consciousness after the 'night sea journey.'
Von Franz reads the Egyptian Aker symbol as the alchemical underworld's threshold moment — the nadir of psychic death that simultaneously inaugurates the rebirth of consciousness.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
The realm of chthonic gods, of spirits and departed souls, seemed to be close at hand. Ploutonia, i.e. direct inlets to the underworld, existed at many places, as also did Psychopompeia, clefts in the rock through which the souls can pass out into the upper world.
Rohde documents the geographic immediacy of the Greek underworld in popular and cultic belief, showing that Ploutonia and Psychopompeia marked physical sites of underworld access in ancient religious life.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
Like the gate and the gate-keeper, the waters that divide Erebos from the world of the living are already known to Homer. The custom of burying the dead with a small coin fixed between the teeth was also explained as provision for the passage-money that would have to be paid to Charon.
Rohde traces the classical topography of the underworld — Kerberos, Charon, the separating waters — demonstrating how ritual practice encoded belief in the structured geography of the realm of the dead.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
The nekyia into Hell's ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself. We can meet Cain, Judas, and Lucifer by being aware of our own desires to be false and to betray.
Hillman argues for a homeopathic approach to the underworld's coldest regions — psychopathy and radical betrayal — requiring the therapist to engage from within the same psychic temperature, not from charity.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
Perhaps this story once meant that Demeter herself went down into the Underworld, and there found Baubo and Dysaules — beings in whose house it was so ill to dwell.
Kerényi speculatively recovers a variant of the Eleusinian myth in which Demeter herself descends to the underworld, deepening the initiatory feminine dimension of the descent narrative.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
A last way out of oppositionalism is the best: stop fantasying in its terms, so as to see and see into each thing for what it is. This way out is also the way into the underworld of images.
Hillman identifies the release from binary oppositional thinking as simultaneously the entry into the underworld — the domain of pure images apprehended for their own sake rather than as contraries.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
To look at them from an underworld perspective means to regard them as carriers of soul, perhaps totem carriers of our own free-soul or death-soul, there to help us see in the dark.
Hillman proposes that the underworld perspective transforms dream animals from instinct-carriers into soul-carriers, repositioning them as guides for psychic vision in the dark rather than as symbols of biological energy.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
The deeper you descended, the more vibrant became the colors along the wall... In some strange way this descent was like going toward rather than away from life.
A biographical account of Hillman's Egyptian experience in the pyramids, which his companion identifies as formative preparation for the experiential and imaginal thinking underlying The Dream and the Underworld.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
There, in front, stand the echoing halls of the god of the lower-world, strong Hades, and of awful Persephone. A fearful hound guards the house in front, pitiless, and he has a cruel trick.
Hesiod provides the primary mythological source-text for the underworld's architectural and guardian features — Hades, Persephone, Kerberos — that subsequent depth-psychological authors inherit and psychologize.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting
Ge herself shows two aspects. On the one hand, she has to do with retributive justice, with the Fates, and she has also mantic, oracular powers.
Hillman's etymological and mythographic analysis of Ge, Chthon, and Demeter distinguishes their psychological meanings, establishing the layered chthonic imaginal field that borders and partially overlaps with the underworld proper.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979aside