A descent to the Underworld: Awaken your true, beautiful self

Psyche's gift to the disconnected: how to find love and life within

Jan 22, 2025

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If you struggle to feel connected – to other people, to yourself, to your work, or even just the world around you, then this is for you.

This article is part of a short series exploring the empowering lessons to be learned from the myth of Psyche and Eros. If you want a more detailed rendition of that story, check out the first piece in the series. But you don't need to do that in order to follow along with this one because I'm going to tell you everything you need to know.

The myth of Psyche and Eros – a summary

Here's where we're at: Psyche, a mortal woman who has fallen in love with Eros, the god of love, finds herself thrown in a dungeon by the goddess Aphrodite (Eros' mother), and set a series impossible tasks in order to regain her freedom. In terms of Jungian psychology, these tasks can be understood as representations of four deepening stages of individuation – the process by which we differentiate ourselves from our parents and family, and from the conditioned rules and expectations that seek to control us, in order to become who we actually are.

Against all odds, Psyche succeeded in the first three trials. Now, she has just one left to go, and it will earn her the greatest reward of all.

Psyche's ultimate test is to journey into the underworld to meet Persephone – the queen of Hades – and secure a tiny piece of her beauty in a golden box.

But no living mortal is supposed to return from Hades once they've entered and Psyche knows this. So, once again, she begins her quest in a state of hopelessness and despair. She climbs a tall tower with the intention of jumping from the top, believing her death to be the only way to enter the Underworld, and resigned to the prospect of staying there.

However, the tower, seemingly imbued with divine wisdom, speaks to Psyche and gives her detailed instructions for how to succeed in this final task:

The tower's advice

Find a particular cave in order to gain access to Hades.
Take two coins to pay Charon, the ferryman of the Styx.
Take two barley cakes to appease Cerberus, the guard dog of Hades.
Do not assist any of the souls you encounter on the journey, no matter how helpless they might appear.
Once you have retrieved the beauty, do not look in the box.

And so Psyche finds the cave, journeys to the border of Hades, pays the ferryman and feeds Cerberus. Three times, she is asked for assistance by various helpless creatures along the way, including a frail old man who reaches for her hand, hoping she'll pull him across the river as he hasn't got the strength to make the crossing himself. Remembering the tower's advice, she ignores them all.

Once in Hades, she's surprised to find that Persephone willingly provides her with a portion of beauty, and then she returns to the land of the living, paying Charon and Cerberus the final coin and cake as she goes.

But this is where Psyche slips up: she has done everything the tower asked of her, and, back above ground where it all feels safe, Psyche succumbs to the temptation to look in the box, hoping to steal a little of its contents to make her even more beautiful to Eros. But, the moment she lays eyes on Persephone's beauty, Psyche falls into a deep, death-like sleep.

Not all is lost, however, because, with Psyche's tasks all but complete, her love Eros is now able to save her, bringing her back to consciousness with a kiss. Finally, Psyche is made a goddess and gets to live out the rest of eternity in happy union with the love of her now immortal life, which is the ultimate reward for the completion of these increasingly challenging trials.

Symbolism and meaning

Psyche's first task was about discernment: being able to recognise the difference between conscious and unconscious content; true instinct and conditioned ideas, etc. In other words, it was relatively surface-level.

Her second and third tasks went deeper, asking her to confront and face the repressed and therefore intimidating masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche respectively.

This fourth task takes it to the ultimate level. Now, journeying into the Underworld itself, Psyche must go beyond simple awareness and integrate the shadow self (the repressed and forgotten aspects of the psyche) that she finds there.

The Underworld as a psychological shadowland

The Underworld is the land of the dead. Psychologically, this represents the resting or holding place for all the many, many parts of the personality that we have, for one reason or another, rejected over the course of our lives. We often think of the shadow as a black mass of all of our bad bits, but it's worth mentioning here that we relegate all sorts of positive and potentially empowering parts of the personality to the Underworld, too: strengths we don't believe we deserve; qualities we don't think we should display; values and beliefs that can serve us but that don't really fit with the values of others in our lives, and so on.

Persephone as Anima (or the unconscious feminine principle)

So, while Psyche's descent is undeniably frightening, it's not all bad down there. This is illustrated by Persephone – the potentially fearsome queen of the Underworld – happily handing over a little of her beauty. Persephone serves as a representation of the unconscious feminine principle or Anima. As such, this task invites a deeper connection with the feminine archetype within – the aspect of oneself that is intuitive, nurturing, patient and receptive and serves as an important counterbalance to the traditionally masculine aspects of outgoing competitiveness and the pursuit of power, success, wealth, etc.

The death-like sleep as ego dissolution

When Psyche succumbs to the temptation to peer inside the box and falls into the death-like sleep, it may seem like a huge failure or even punishment. But there's a positive interpretation of this motif, too. The sheer power of the Anima causes Psyche's conscious self to retreat – otherwise known as ego dissolution or ego death – which signifies the breakdown of old ego structures and therefore creates the potential for a new, more integrated self to emerge. Which, of course, it does.

Eros' kiss as rebirth

When Psyche is awoken by Eros' kiss, she is a new being – she is integrated and whole (which is represented by her ascension to the rank of goddess).

A note for anyone who missed the first episode in this series: when myths and fairytales are read through a Jungian lens, all characters and other elements are thought to represent parts of the self as opposed to separate, other people or things. Eros, therefore, is not seen as an external saviour but as a part of our heroine's psyche that has been, until this point, hidden in the unconscious. It's as a result of Psyche's success in her trials that Eros is realised as inner protector and saviour. The part of the personality required to assert oneself as an individual is integrated, providing the yang to complement the yin, and signifying the end of this cycle of change.

Psyche’s gift to people-pleasers

But we don't get to birth a whole new self without struggle. Question: when I told the story at the beginning of this post, did you find the Tower's instruction to withhold help from the needy a little strange? Did it shock you a bit, or feel unnecessary? That's how I heard it the first time, but this part of the myth bears such a beautiful and salient message.

When Psyche returns from Hades using the second coin and cake to get back above ground, she looks down at her now empty hands and realises why she was told not to help those who asked for assistance along the way. Had she given the old man her hand, she would have had to drop either the coin or the cake, and then she wouldn't have had all that she needed. It's worth noting that this story was written in ancient Greece, long before the invention of bras, so she couldn't just shove one cake in her left cup as we'd do these days. Rather, she'd be stuck in the Underworld, unable to return.

The message conveyed by this part of the story is this: whether we're literally transitioning from life to death as a result of terminal illness, or through the metaphorical underworld of depression, addiction, grief, an abusive relationship, a failure or any other hardship, we have to learn to say 'no'. These journeys are difficult and often lengthy. If we give our time, energy and other precious resources to others during these periods, we will prolong our stay in Hades, sometimes indefinitely.

Imagine how easy it would have been for Psyche to reach out and take that old man's hand. Boundaries are hard. Setting them can make us feel selfish, and they can upset those they affect. But they're necessary if we're going to make any kind of important change, just as they're necessary for the process of individuation itself. If we never learn to appreciate our boundaries – where we stop and the rest of the world begins – and if we fail to master the skill of both understanding and expressing our authentic needs, desires, values and beliefs, then we will never be able to step into our authentic skin. We will not become our true selves. I find this message incredibly powerful.

The lure of beauty

There's one last important piece of symbolism involved in the retrieval of Persephone's beauty. This part of Psyche's story speaks to the familiar challenge of reckoning with the desire for superficial beauty or external validation.

The tempting box of beauty symbolises the allure of vanity, our need to seek external approval, and the dangers of being consumed by the illusion of perfection. In Jungian terms, what we're talking about is the ego's desire to mask the true self with a superficial persona.

Of course, this threat almost defeats Psyche. She does succumb to that temptation, but when she beholds the raw and vital power of the Anima, what actually happens is change. The old self dissolves into nothing – it dies – and, as a result, a new, more real and whole self is able to come into being.

So, rather than finding the superficial beauty she thinks she wants, when Psyche dares to witness her true self, she finds something that's beautiful in a much, much deeper way: love. Psyche's story ends with the unifying force of love bringing her and Eros together – the feminine and masculine aspects of psyche integrating to achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The path to wholeness

In a world obsessed with appearance and success, with fairytale endings and Disney romances teaching us to expect happiness to come from the outside, the myth of Psyche, (when viewed in this way) teaches the importance of focusing on inner growth and authenticity instead.

We try to numb our pain, deny our "weaknesses", and paint a perfect picture of who we are in order to succeed in life, or in order to feel wanted. To feel enough. But in doing so, we prevent our authentic selves – which are enough – from ever coming into being.

So, we need to drop the act. It's by facing our fears, accepting the parts of self that we don't like, and finding value in who we really are that we actually get to have what we want. Ultimately, a sense of wholeness, fullness, and true connection to both self and other is available to all of us. It's just that we need to look within, before we begin our search without.

Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.