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What We Lose — and Gain — in the Underworld
uch of our world today speaks the language of Reason — facts, logic,
proofs.
It is a powerful and necessary tongue.
It has built bridges,
cured diseases, carried us into the stars.
But it is not the only language we need.
There are times when Reason falls short —
when the heart breaks,
when
the ground vanishes beneath our feet,
when the bright certainties of Life
dissolve into shadow.
In such moments, it is not logic we reach for, but something more
primal:
Story.
Myth.
Symbol.
The deep language of the soul.
I think of the left brain as the mind — the realm of reason and logic;
and
the right brain as the soul — the realm of emotion and intuition.
For
better and worse, we human beings are made of both.
Reason is like a focused, bright flashlight.
It helps us see immediate
things, make sound decisions, mend what can be mended.
But the soul is a vast cavern.
The light of Reason can show us small corners of it — enough to walk a few
steps safely.
But it cannot show us the whole.
It shines the wrong
kind of light.
It cannot illuminate the enormity, the hidden oceans of
longing, grief, and wonder that live and breathe within us.
For that, we need another kind of knowing.
A knowing that listens to
echoes, that maps by memory and symbol, that feels its way along unseen
walls.
For that, we need Story.
Carl Jung, the great explorer of the human soul, called these deep symbolic
patterns "archetypes" —
living maps of the inner life we all
share.
The best myths are not just old stories.
They are mirrors and
guides, showing us how to walk through loss, transformation, and rebirth.
One of the oldest — and most important — is the myth of the Underworld.
It comes in many forms:
Persephone, stolen from the bright fields of her
childhood and dragged down into the Abyss.
Inanna, descending through
seven gates, surrendering all she carried.
Orpheus, walking willingly
into Darkness for the sake of love.
The Underworld is not a fantasy.
It is an experience every soul will one
day know:
A sudden loss.
A shattering diagnosis.
A betrayal.
A
death.
A door that closes and will not reopen.
The Underworld does not ask for permission.
It simply opens — slowly,
inexorably, irresistibly.
We must walk differently here — by intuition, by ancient memory.
One clear guide through this dark terrain is the story of Orpheus.
He was the greatest musician of his day, it was said —
his music so
powerful it could charm stones, rivers, even the dead.
When his beloved
Eurydice died, bitten by a snake, Orpheus could not bear her loss.
He
took his lyre, and descended into the Land of Shadows.
Through the dark halls of the Underworld he walked, singing.
Even the
stony-hearted gods wept to hear him.
Moved by his sorrow, Hades and
Persephone agreed to release Eurydice —
On one condition:
Orpheus must not look back at her until they had both fully returned to the living world.
He agreed.
Step by step, he climbed upward, Eurydice silently behind him, unseen,
unfelt.
And near the threshold of the living world — so close —
doubt
seized him.
Was she truly there?
Was it all a cruel illusion?
Orpheus turned.
And in that instant, Eurydice vanished — into the abysmal depths.
He had descended for love.
He returned with only sorrow — and a music the
world had never heard before.
This is the part of the story many leave untold:
Orpheus did not simply fail.
He paid the true price of descent.
He lost
what he most loved —
the very thing for which he had braved the
Descent.
But he carried something else back:
A song shaped by loss, tempered by
grief, strong enough to outlast death itself.
A song that could not have
been born in the fields of light.
A song that could only be forged
underground, among shadows and echoes.
So it is for us.
The journeys that wreck us do not always return what we lost.
Sometimes
they return us, changed.
Bearing a music we could never have learned
without walking through shadow.
Birthing a new music within us —
a
music we could never have learned without walking through
darkness,
without losing what we thought we could not live without.
And it is this music, our new song born of dark night, that we and the world most desperately need.
—William Zeitler
2025 April 26
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