UNDERWORLD Part 1

***************DISCLAIMER***************

I am going into some deep waters in these posts on the Underworld.

Do not look for reassuring certainties in anything I am saying.

If you read these posts, you are understanding that you are

setting sail from the reassuring little circle of the known world
into the dark and mysterious seas of what lies beyond.

Nothing is certain here, nothing is normal here, read if you want.

Reader discretion is assumed.

Here be dragons.

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"I went to the countries underneath the Earth

To the peoples of the past

But my life was lifted up from the Pit."

-One translation of Jonah 2:6 from the Greek Bible

Before we dive off the deep end, let us talk about the terms Otherworld and Underworld. In various mythologies, Otherworld is considered to be a place in the real physical world where people go when they die. This physical place is, as it were, beyond the horizon. For the Greeks, this was Elysium or the Fortunate Isles, for the Celts these were the Isles of the Blest, for the Native American this was the happy hunting ground. Both the Greeks and Celts and various other Indo-European groups considered the Isles of the Blest to be at the extreme Western edge of the world, far out into the Atlantic Ocean, the place where the Sun sets. The place where the Sun itself goes to seemingly die. The Greeks actually had multiple versions of the afterlife, not all very pleasant, some placed in what they would have considered the Underworld rather than the Otherworld.

Just as the Otherworld was considered a real physical place except out of view, the Underworld was considered a real physical place except underneath the ground, literally. There was not considered to be anything ethereal or insubstantial about either of these places. While the Underworld tended to take on negative connotations over time, as civilizations became more 'civilized' and got further away from their spiritual roots, there was no negative connotation to the Underworld originally. It was considered a critically essential part of the world, just as decay is essential to new growth in the plant world, and just as the Past plants the seeds for Present which in turn plants the seeds for the Future. It was a place where what is old and worn out gets recycled and is reborn in new growth again. A good thing, an essential thing. Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, had close ties to this Underworld and in some cases sacrifices to her were made into pits - portals into the Underworld. Any organic gardener understands this: proper decay is essential to new growth. Death of the old is essential to the life of the new, and the life of the past forms the life of the future.

The thoughts and actions of the past also lead to the present and the future in a continual flow: from Underworld to Overworld, and the Overworld becomes itself recycled into the Underworld continually as time flows. Karma is also essentially a chthonic concept: your past makes your future. The word 'chthonic' for the ancient Greeks meaning pertaining to the Underworld as versus Olympian which pertained to the Olympian gods. However over the centuries as people lost that more holistic view of the world in which life and death were inseparable, the chthonic became more and more despised. The vilification of the Underworld as an evil malign place ultimately had its final twisted fruits in the Christian conception of Hell, which was originally considered to be literally underground. The Christian hell is a degenerated version of the Greek and Roman Underworld.

Obviously I do not believe in literal kingdoms underground. Obviously I do not believe that paradise is a tropical island that somehow has evaded Google Maps. For ancient peoples, these were sensible assumptions about what they perceived about invisible realities, but they aren't sensible now. However, I do think that they were onto something, a lot of things actually, and I do think that we can learn from them about matters to which they were much more sensitive than the average person today is. Yes, I think the Underworld, what I often call the Dreaming, is real and that the Otherworld or Otherworlds might well exist in it. I have reasons for this, but I cannot necessarily make those reasons satisfactory to anyone else. Here is what I think: make of it what you will.

Before I start digging into the Underworld in more detail, which I hope to do in subsequent posts, we need to pause a moment and take a look at time. I have touched on this in other posts as well, but for the sake of conciseness I'll recap here.

TIME:

"Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature 

flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is 

called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and 

external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of 

motion, which is commonly used instead of true time.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, 

remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable 

dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by 

its position to bodies: and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space."
-Isaac Newton

Time in the modern Western worldview is viewed as a sequential series of discrete quanta: essentially you get time in this view by stringing together a series of static moments. The fact that these static moments do not actually exist anywhere doesn't seem to bother anyone much, but we can see a parallel between the idea of quanta of time and quanta of matter. The West always wanted to view matter as discrete, easily measurable particles: originally atoms were these particles, and originally they were thought to be indivisible. The fact that atoms could be broken down to smaller particles seemingly ad infinitum didn't seem to bother anyone as long as quanta, individual solid units, could be found at the bottom of the pile somewhere. The Western mind had an instinctive unease with the idea of liquidity and motion: motion had to be understood as a set of static instants on a graph. The mathematician Georg Cantor ran headlong into this desire for stasis when he studied the subject of infinity. Georg was a religious man and sought certainty in his understanding of infinity, seeking thereby to come closer to the mind of God. What he found instead was the disturbing realization that any defined section of an infinity contains an infinity of infinities. The distance between zero and one is a set containing an infinite number of fully infinite infinities. This realization may or may not have contributed to his subsequent mental breakdown, but surely the firestorm of criticism he received from his peers for this did contribute to it. One equivalent of this realization in physics is the realization that particles can appear to be either particles or waves, depending on the situation, and that certainly the idea of particles as purely solid objects does not at all quite fit the facts. What we thought of as solid static particles, we now know are inherently squishy.

What I am saying here is this applies to time as well. The inherent nature of time is not one of stasis but one of motion, and that motion cannot ever be fully broken down into static instants, any more than the distance between zero and one can be broken down into a finite set of tiny units of measure. The yawning infinities between zero and one are just like the inherent fluidity between one arbitrarily measured second and the next one.

Moreover, while we are trained to view time as a linear progression of instants, and it can be hard at first to wrap your mind around a different way of viewing time, if we attend closely to our actual perception of time it is completely different from this linear graph. Our actual perception is this: a fluidity. The past recedes out of view and the future comes into view in the same present. This is another way of saying that the present isn't a static being, it is inherently a becoming. The present overtakes the past in the present: the present is overtaken by the future in the present. The neutral, uniform, objective, mathematical time that Newton spoke of does not exist. Moreover, a non-participatory objective viewpoint from which to view time does not exist: we are inherently participating in this endless becoming, this continuous revelation and hiddenness simultaneously.

Imagine looking at a rotating globe of the Earth through a microscope, so that only a small circle of the passing surface of the Earth is visible through the lens. One can imagine one landform moving to the center of our view and then passing out again and some new landform coming into view. Time is the same way: there is the part you can see and the part you can't see. There are the manifested parts that have moved into the field of vision and the unmanifested parts that are outside it. This is the view of both time and space that native peoples have tended to take: that the world is divided thus into what has come into your vision and what has gone beyond your vision. Which means that the parts that have gone beyond your view still exist in some form, they just aren't revealing themselves to you at that moment. That part that has gone beyond view, is what I describe as the Dreaming: the Underworld. The Underworld includes the past and all the thoughts and actions and ideas and visions and mindsets of the past, which are continually in the act of making the present. Past continually makes present: death continually makes life. Past and present, life and death, are part of a continuous whole. We have spent two thousand years trying to split the universe into little bits, only to realize it can never be split. It is an inherent whole. It is an inherent cosmos in each and every little part. Each part is enmeshed with the whole.

The Underworld is a whole other side of the world that we don't want to see, that we have been vilifying and in denial about for millennia. Finally we turned a blind eye to it altogether and denied its existence. I think we need it as much as we need our next breath; as much as plants need soil and people need food. The world is not whole without it. It is the repository of all our myths and archetypes, as well as the source of the very material substance of our existence. You can't have the world we know without it, the world we have denied. The Underworld.

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Up to this point, I have been sort of treating the Underworld as if it were itself a static thing, abode of archetypes and the past. I hope to make clear in my next post that I think no such thing: the Underworld itself is dynamic, continually bubbling up, as it were, into the visible world. The Overworld is only our window on the Underworld: the finite perspective of our particular location in it.

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