Where is the Underworld?

Where is the Underworld?  It is not beneath the ground; not deep in the earth but in a fathomless depth not of this earth.

James Hillman, in his masterwork about dreaming, The Dream and the Underworld, locates this home territory of the dream anywhere we see through into the darkness; into images, resemblances, correspondences.

The Underworld is Hades' realm.  Not literal, physical death, not the decay and decomposition which is the only death ego can imagine, but Death as shifting image, as flickering shadow; as metaphor.

We enter by means of reflection--pausing, pondering, a change of pace, a voice or glance dropping levels.  Our movement there is Hermetic, a cocked ear, a sideways look, a suspicious fish eye, intuitional feelings and thoughts that appear in the midst of life and twist life into psyche. Into soul.  The underworld is soul's home.

The Journey Oracle cards are a chariot pulled by black horses watched for by Soul.  She is waiting on the sound of their approach.  The Journey Oracle will carry her across the barriers erected by our culture's neglect of the Underworld, which in our time is called the Unconscious.  To go there, C.G. Jung said, is to go to "the all embracing vision of the myth."

Watch for the new Journey Oracle card deck and book on this website near the full moon in June.