Conversations with Zak Stein, Stephen Jenkinson & Charlotte Du Cann

Traversing the Underworld: What Myth Can Teach us During the Pandemic

This is a very beautiful essay. Probably the best thing I have read so far on the deeper archetypal processes underway.

Alexander Beiner makes a distinction between “Ghosts” who still hope to return to the old system and “Voyagers” who realize the old system is gone and we are now journeying into the unknown together to discover the new.

I love a lot of it, but this was particularly resonant:

” Charlotte Du Cann holds a deep understanding of what these myths are trying to tell us. At the start of the pandemic she wrote a piece called Outbreak which drew on, among other myths, that of Psyche. Psyche is not a goddess but a beautiful mortal who starts out idolised by all around her, and must go on a journey down into the underworld to find her true love. She is given various humble tasks, such as sorting seeds, that take her on a process of transformation.

Du Cann believes that this is a key myth for our times. We are undergoing a transformation, like Psyche (which is also the Greek word for ‘butterfly’) which sees us having to come back to the earth. Back to the humility of sorting seeds. Like her namesake, it is this cocooning into the earth that changes her. So strikingly different from the hero’s journey that takes us ‘out there’ to transform ourselves. As Du Cann writes in Outbreak: “Having resisted every warning and admonishment to transform and change our ways, we are now, as a collective, being forced into a cocoon ourselves, in lockdowns and self-isolation, to do the work we should have done generations ago.”

I am seeing, all across my Facebook feed, people focused on the various Underworld aspects of this moment – the fear of vaccines, the question of whether Bill Gates is a super villain, the question of whether the virus was engineered and spread intentionally, worries about what is happening in the US. I have been guilty of falling under the spell of seeking to sort through all of these shards, hoping to find some clarity in the horror. Reading this, I feel more centered and hopeful. We need to shift our focus to the archetypal and mythological in order for something new to emerge