I understand the underworld as the realm of souls. As a matter of fact, for the Homeric Greeks the psyche was found on/y in Hades. ife-. We could easily get into a dualism about this and see the underworld as soul and the surface world as physical or mundane life. So it is important we remember that the earth mother Gaia, who supports all physical life, was at the same time an accomplice to Hades. For her the underworld is also part of nature. From this Gaia perspective, we can then see Demeter and Persephone as a pair, i. e., as aspects of each other-so that when one of them does something, the other also shares in the activity.' In order to care for psychic growth and vegetation, Demeter/Persephone must discriminate among it. Or perhaps Demeter's caring is a natural discrimination, though most probably not along the lines Neurosis and the Rape of Demeter/Persephone 19) of Linnaeus (genus, species, and gender) but more in terms of place and season, what grows where and when. Natural objects are particulars, which require particular soil, climatic conditions, and care. With this sort of discrimination natural products are perceptively separate from each other, even while they may grow alongside each other. As Persephone is at home with underworld essences, she perceives surface-world differences.° By this I mean that the appreciation of differences in Demeter's realm of nature is also a perception of essence in Persephone's realm-where essence is the ""Unseen,'' the hidden seed of the pomegranate, or the *'invisible.''' In this way, to notice upperworld differences is at the same time to perceive by means of an underworld consciousness of invisibles.
— Patricia Berry
Berry is making a precise move here that is easy to miss: she refuses the dualism before it forms. The underworld is not the opposite of natural life — it is what Gaia also is. That means the soul's depth is not elsewhere; it is the invisible dimension of exactly what is visible, the essence hidden inside ordinary surface-differences the way a seed is hidden inside a pomegranate.
What follows from this is a particular kind of perception. To notice that one plant needs this soil, another needs that season, is not mere botanical sorting — it is, Berry argues, an underworld act. Persephone's eye and Demeter's care are the same eye looking in two directions at once. Discrimination by place and season, by the specific requirements of particular things, is already a perception of essence. You are not moving between worlds when you attend to particulars; you are already in both.
This matters because so much of what passes for depth work involves a flight from particulars — the surface dismissed in favor of meaning, the specific dream image dissolved into archetype. Berry's Demeter/Persephone pair blocks that move. The invisible does not replace the particular; it inhabits it. To care carefully for what is specific and bodied — this growing thing, in this ground, in this season — is itself the form that underworld consciousness takes in a world still alive.
Patricia Berry·Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology·1982