[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Title & Author” module_id=”author” module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”4.3.4″]<\/p>\n
Descensus Ad Inferos:
Dante\u2019s Mythic Nekyia Journey in The Inferno<\/em><\/h1>\nRon Boyer,\u00a0<\/span>Graduate Theological Union\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Abstract” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.2″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Abstract<\/h2>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false” custom_padding=”||0px|||”]Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em> is an early masterpiece of European literature as a whole and a medieval prototype of modern mythopoeic literature. In creating his epic mythopoeic narrative, Dante utilizes widely recurring narrative metaphors and symbolic topographical motifs adapted from pre-existing mythologies to describe a mortal\u2019s mythic journey of descent into the mythical Underworld or Land of the Dead. The essay examines Dante\u2019s nekyia<\/em> or archetypal hero journey of descent into the netherworld of Dis, the archetypal Land of the Dead, led by the spirit of Virgil as they travel ever downward through the dark depths of The Inferno\u2019s<\/em> underworld landscape. The paper analyzes the poetic text of The Inferno<\/em> (augmented by the iconographic, pictorial art of Gustave Dore), focusing on symbolic, structural depth-imagery of a conventional nature in Dante\u2019s literary narrative adapted from recurring primordial images found throughout the world\u2019s mythologies and ritual narratives. The Inferno<\/em> is interpreted as a medieval literary example of mythopoeic imagery common to ancient hero myths (including The Aeneid<\/em>) and initiatory ritual schema the world over, interpreted as loci of psychological meaning in the interdisciplinary works of psychologist Carl G. Jung, mythologist Joseph Campbell, and others.<\/p>\nKeywords: <\/em>archetypes, Carl G. Jung, comparative mythology, Dante, depth psychology, Divine Comedy, iconography, Joseph Campbell, literature, mythology, nekyia[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”first section” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n\nThe night sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos<\/em>, a descent into Hades, and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious.<\/p>\n\u2014Carl Gustav Jung<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em> (Ciardi, 1970) is an early masterpiece of world literature, an enduring perhaps immortal literary classic whose stature rivals ancient classics such as Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> (Lattimore, 1967) and Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em> (Fagles, 2010)\u2014the work upon which The Comedy<\/em> is deliberately modeled.\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> is also an early prototype of the modern literary genre referred to as mythopoeic<\/em> (or mythopoetic<\/em>) literature, as well as an example of what might be called archetypal<\/em> literature, a general category of narrative transcending specific literary and cinematic genres, for instance, the mythological and literary expressions of the hero quest myth whose symbolic structure was delineated by mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949\/1973).<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An argument can be made that Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> is an example, written in the late Middle Ages, of mythopoeic literature as a symbolic hero quest myth (Campbell) and nekyia <\/em>journey of descent (Jung).\u00a0 Mythopoeic literature[1]<\/sup><\/a> has been associated with the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings, his distinguished literary colleagues at Oxford, as well as the specific literary genres of fantasy and speculative fiction in which Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are acknowledged pioneers.\u00a0 These authors made use of pre-existing mythological elements in creating fictional narrative worlds, literary myths evoking an obviously mythic quality and making significant use of conventional features of myth-making.\u00a0 In short, authors of mythopoeic narratives utilize archetypal symbols and structure\u2014in the forms of recurring motifs and images\u2014in the creation of their tales.\u00a0 Dante uses many such mythic images in creating the imaginal realm of The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, which might also be understood as a prototype in the genre of literary horror, a sub-category of speculative and fantasy fiction.\u00a0 For example, much of Dante\u2019s subject matter in The Inferno<\/em> consists of the nearly indescribable horrors of Hell, exhaustively and terrifyingly catalogued by the author.\u00a0 This fictional portrayal influenced centuries of popular Christianity\u2019s literalistic conceptions of Hell reaching down to the present day.\u00a0 On the level of narrative craft, Dante uses the first person point of view of story narration to powerful effect, a technique of writing craft uniquely suited for horror tales in which the author, as fictitious narrator of a tale, describes fantastic realities as a form of fictional memoir, thus granting the credibility of a first- person witness account of the uncanny events related in the tale\u2014a technique used by masters of horror from G. du Maupassant (e.g., The Horla, <\/em>1989) to H.P. Lovecraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Smooth-Wind-e.png” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ hover_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Jungian Theory” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Mythopoetics and Jungian Archetypal Theory <\/h2>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]While an argument can be made for Dante\u2019s tale as an early masterpiece of horror\u2014for nowhere in the annals of world literature are the ghastly nightmarish horrors of Hell more vividly and exhaustively described by any poet than in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>\u2014the focus of this exploration is on the narrative\u2019s more universal, indigenous pagan symbolism, viewed as a locus of psychological meaning.\u00a0 Rather than reaching forward from literature of the Middle Ages to the present, the study takes a backwards glance at Dante\u2019s masterpiece, emphasizing its symbolic and structural roots in myths the world over, expressed in the primordial imagery upon which the modern mythopoeic genre is based.\u00a0 After all, the Greek word mythopoeia<\/em> means mythmaking<\/em>, and it is in this universal, timeless symbolic language of myth\u2014the poetic grammar of recurring metaphors, symbols, images, and motifs\u2014that the underlying elements of mythmaking are found.<\/p>\nThese roots of mythopoeic storytelling are evident in the symbolic forms and structural elements of storytelling narrative, whether mythic, literary, or cinematic.\u00a0 To speak metaphorically, the language of mythic narrative is constructed of an archetypal <\/em>alphabet consisting of symbolic imagery, as the analyst Carl G. Jung[2]<\/sup><\/a> discovered, the building blocks of mythopoeic forms.\u00a0 Mythic language is a language rich in poetic, symbolic forms, that is, the imagery of metaphor and simile.\u00a0 For such reasons, archetypal literary theorist and myth-critic Northrop Frye (1963) viewed the whole of world literature as \u201cdisplaced mythology\u201d (pp. 21-38).\u00a0 Jung posited a collective unconscious<\/em>, a timeless and universal psyche, as the source of these images appearing in myth, literature, and other forms. The unconscious psyche, Jung suggested, possesses the capacity to represent \u201caffect laden situations\u201d poetically and symbolically in a universal \u201cpicture language\u201d of \u201cmyth-motifs\u201d that, following Plato and others, he called archetypes<\/em>.\u00a0 Archetypes, rooted in the instincts and human biology, are presumably universal, according to Jung, and transcend time and space.\u00a0 In short, these primordial images<\/em> appear everywhere, in all times and places, with analogous imagery found in the creation myths and hero myths of the world, folklore and fairytale, the arts and religion, as well as in the dreams and imaginative fantasies of contemporary individuals, including psychotics and creative artists (like Dante).<\/p>\nJung noticed that the same images he observed in myth, fairytales, and visual arts appeared in his own dreams and fantasies, as well as those of his patients.\u00a0 This observation of analogous imagery appearing repeatedly and spontaneously in distant times and places too historically and geographically remote to have been disseminated by cultural diffusion, led to Jung\u2019s theory of the archetypes.\u00a0 His observations of repetitive image-patterns eventually evolved into Jung\u2019s\u00a0 interpretive analytical methodology called amplification<\/em> or analogical <\/em>thinking, which consisted chiefly of noticing patterns of analogous imagery wherever they appear, used as tools for understanding unconscious psychic processes in his patients.\u00a0 Jung defined these archetypal primordial images or symbolic myth-motifs as \u201cforms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin\u201d (Jung, 1958, pp. 83\u201384).<\/p>\nThese recurring primordial images are the presumptively universal elements of a symbolic alphabet from which the language of myth evolves in derivative storytelling forms, including literary and film narratives. The images are like letters forming, collectively, the symbolic alphabet from which the language of mythopoeic narrative is constructed\u2014including, as will be demonstrated shortly, Dante\u2019s Comedy.\u00a0 <\/em>Jung\u2019s primordial images or myth-motifs function as the fundamental metaphorical building blocks of myth, familiar to storytellers, myth-makers, and their audiences since primordial pasts, when shamans of indigenous tribal peoples everywhere invented metaphors for describing otherwise inexpressible experiential realities, beginning with the cosmogonies and origin myths passed down through oral traditions and sacred rites since the beginning-less past.<\/p>\nIn this study, a textual analysis and archetypal interpretation of Dante\u2019s journey in The Inferno <\/em>is approached through the interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework created by Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, emphasizing the mythopoeic nature of The<\/em> Comedy<\/em> evidenced in its root-meaning of primordial, archetypal transformational imagery of descent-return as initiatory death-rebirth (Boyer, 2014b; Boyer, 2017a; Boyer 2017b).\u00a0 This study focuses on structural imagery of an archetypal-mythopoeic nature in Dante\u2019s narrative, interpreted as symbolic of presumptively universal unconscious psychological transformative processes (Jung\u2019s nekyia<\/em> or journey of symbolic descent into the depths and Land of the Dead), rather than on features of the story that are merely local and historical, that is, its specifically medieval European Christianity-based interpretive framework.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|off” module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_enable_color=”off” custom_padding=”4px|4px|4px|4px|true|true” border_radii=”on|6px|6px|6px|6px” border_width_all=”2px” border_color_all=”#62472a”]<\/p>\nThe unconscious psyche, Jung suggested, possesses the capacity to represent \u201caffect laden situations\u201d poetically and symbolically in a universal \u201cpicture language\u201d of \u201cmyth-motifs\u201d that, following Plato and others, he called archetypes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Depth Imagery” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Depth Imagery” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Depth Imagery in Dante\u2019s Journey of Descent
\n<\/h2>\n
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Findings and Discussion<\/h2>\n
Dante utilized widely recurring visual and narrative metaphors and motifs in describing his journey into Hell, imagery found in abundance in the world\u2019s mythology and ritual narratives common to pre-literate indigenous societies everywhere.\u00a0 Dante crafted his uniquely historical Christian theological interpretation, and political critique of the Church and various powers of his day, on a mythic symbolic superstructure of pagan imagery that is undoubtedly primordial and presumably universal in origin.\u00a0 This mythic symbolism is widely evident in Dante\u2019s trilogy, beginning with the conventional topographical imagery of the initial stage of the hero journey, the archetypal journey of descent into the depths.<\/p>\n
Dante\u2019s hero descent into the depths of a dusky wood.<\/strong>\u00a0 \u201cStopped mid-motion in the middle\/Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky\u2014\/Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 15).[3]<\/sup><\/a> These opening lines of Dante\u2019s Inferno,<\/em> the first book in his epic trilogy, The Divine Comedy<\/em>, are some of the most memorable lines in all of world literature. Readers meet the character \u201cDante,\u201d the narrative hero of The Comedy<\/em>, already lost in the dark depths of his unconscious life, represented by the author<\/em> Dante using the timeless metaphorical myth-motif of a dense, sunless forest. \u201cIt is difficult to describe a forest:\/Savage, arduous, extreme in its extremity\u201d (p. 154). In Dante\u2019s story, this primitive \u201cdusky wood\u201d is the shadowy archetypal landscape through which the hero passes fully \u201cinto the depths of the abyss\u201d (p. 154).<\/p>\n![\"Dante](\"https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Fig-1e-246x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Fig. 1. Dante initiates his journey by entering the symbolic depths of a dark, \u201cdusky\u201d wood. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n
This image of a primeval forest is a typical and widely distributed topographical symbol evident in Indo-European myths, for example, those of the Celts. These ancient narratives depict the stories of the gods, kings, and heroes of mythic Ireland, Britain, and beyond. For instance, semi-divine Celtic heroes like Pwyll (Ford, 1977, pp. 35-56) undertook perilous adventures in the liminal other world<\/em>, frequently described as hunting expeditions into a densely forested wilderness.\u00a0 This ancient imagery reappears in medieval Celtic Romance literature, where King Arthur, Parsifal, and the knights of the Grail quest typically initiate their quests by entering a pathless path<\/em> into a deep forest, one of Campbell\u2019s favorite depth motifs.<\/p>\nThis myth-motif is also common to Indo-European folk and fairytales, where child-heroes from Hansel and Gretel<\/em> to Red Riding Hood<\/em> (Boyer, 2017a) venture into the depths of enchanted forests, where they typically encounter monstrous supernatural figures (e.g., wolves, witches, etc.) who threaten to devour them.\u00a0 A wonderfully illustrative example of the hero descent into the depths by way of forest appears in the \u201cmodernized fairytale\u201d by L. Frank Baum (1900), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>, where Dorothy Gale\u2019s nekyia<\/em> journey of descent in Oz is portrayed as a series of descents into increasingly dark and frightening woods. In the deepest, darkest forest, the heroine enters the symbolic Land of the Dead in the form of a Haunted Forest where the Cowardly Lion declares: \u201cI do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks.\u201d In the depths of the Haunted Forest\u2014a symbolic Jungian \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014Dorothy is abducted to Hades-like depths, imagined as a desolate shadowy wasteland ,where she is imprisoned in the castle of her supernatural nemesis, the Queen of the Underworld represented as the Wicked Witch of the West.<\/p>\nWhen readers first meet the character Dante in the dusky forest, the hero is already situated in archetypal landscape, a dark and deep otherworldly wilderness through which he must find his way back to the daylight world.\u00a0 Like Dorothy Gale and the questing knights of the Grail, Dante moves through this thickly forested landscape, analogous to the journeys of countless mythic heroes before and after.\u00a0 The image of a dense, dark forest where the hero is lost functions as a powerful visual metaphor for the descent into Jung\u2019s collective unconscious, the primordial realm of archetypes. The heroes of countless mythic narratives personify this encounter with the unknown, described as a symbolic transformative journey across an archetypal magical landscape in an \u201cotherworld\u201d in some form.\u00a0 As archetypal psychologist James Hillman (1979, p. 51) suggested, they move from material to psychical<\/em> space, to the \u201cland of soul.\u201d As a topographical metaphor, the deep dark forest motif can be interpreted consistently, as Campbell suggested, as an image of psychic depths.\u00a0 From the viewpoint of Jung and scholars influenced by his work, including Campbell, this encounter with unknown powers in the dark depths of the forest may be understood as a reflection, in the dark mirror of art, of every individual\u2019s mysterious inner<\/em> journeys into the unknown, as metaphors for unconscious, deep psychic processes of transformation described as the process of individuation<\/em>, Jung\u2019s term for what he viewed as the ultimate aim of human life.\u00a0 For both Jung and Campbell, this journey is interpreted as a perilous road of trials<\/em>.\u00a0 As he prepared to follow Virgil on this descending path, Dante appropriately referred to the adventure ahead as a trial, a \u201cdifficult task\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 25).<\/p>\nSignificantly, in terms of both Jung\u2019s and Campbell\u2019s interpretations, Dante encounters the dead poet Virgil early in his journey into the depths. Virgil tells the hero that he\u2019ll \u201cplay the part of \u2026 guide\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 18).\u00a0 Virgil\u2019s shade becomes Dante\u2019s guide and protector in the netherworld of The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, functioning as psychopomp, Dante\u2019s guide through the underworld, as the Sibyl of Cumae did for the hero Aeneas in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid <\/em>(a.d.\/2006).\u00a0 Virgil also functions in Dante\u2019s narrative as the \u201csupernatural ally\u201d Campbell typically observed in archetypal hero quests.\u00a0 \u201cThe first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure,\u201d said Campbell (1949\/1973, p. 69). Virgil, as this protective guide, personifies the \u201cbenign protecting power of destiny\u201d (p. 71).[4]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 In Jungian terms, Virgil represents the archetypal Wise Old Man, a personification of the Self, a figure Jung considered a major archetype.<\/p>\nVirgil, as Wise Old Man in Dante\u2019s poetic narrative, is Dante\u2019s teacher and mentor on the journey, until he leaves Dante with Beatrice in The<\/em> Purgatorio <\/em>(Ciardi, 1970), Dante\u2019s feminine supernatural ally and protective guide in the tale.\u00a0 In Jung\u2019s terms, this larger-than-life anima <\/em>figure in Dante\u2019s tale looms in the narrative background, beckoning and inspiring\u2014in the form of poetic Muse\u2014Dante\u2019s journey as both author and character.\u00a0 Such figures, which personify the Self, the anima, etc., are, according to Jung, among the key archetypal characters found in myths throughout the world\u2014along with the archetypal Shadow, in this tale represented by a multitude of dark spirits and damned figures the hero meets on his journey, including Satan himself. These larger-than-life figures are encountered, Jung added, in the transformative imagery of the individuation process, a psychological process analogous to journeys of heroic descent and symbolically depicted in a variety of ways in the fairytales and myths of the world.<\/p>\n![\"Dante](\"https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Fig-2e-240x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Fig. 2. Upon entrance to the underworld, Dante and Virgil begin a night-sea journey when the boatman of the underworld, Charon, approaches to take them to the Other Shore. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n
Dante\u2019s descent pictured as Jung\u2019s night-sea journey. <\/strong>Both Freud and Jung observed a phenomenon they refer to as an over-determination<\/em> of symbols in dreams, creative fantasies, and the narrative representations of myth.\u00a0 It is as if the unconscious, the presumed source of creativity and symbolic language in depth psychology, reinforces the imagery so that multiple symbolic images in the content of a given dream or work of art possess complementary and analogous meanings that reinforce and amplify its symbolic message.\u00a0 The hero journey into the depths of the forest, a common myth-motif in folk and fairytales and myths the world over, is echoed in the analogous metaphorical imagery of what Jung calls the \u201cnight sea journey,\u201d a journey into the dark night and depths of a watery abyss.\u00a0 As Jung\u2019s opening epigraph suggests, the \u201cnight sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos<\/em>, a descent into Hades, and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious\u201d (Jung, 1946\/1992, pp. 83\u201384).<\/p>\nDante\u2019s wedding of the myth-motifs of the hero quest in the depths of forests with Jung\u2019s night sea journey and the analogous myth-motif of subterranean descent into Hades\u2014\u201cthe land of ghosts \u2026 beyond this world\u201d\u2014is a rare example in literary mythology that forcefully illustrates the nearly identical motifs of Campbell\u2019s heroic wilderness landscape and Jung\u2019s thesis of symbolic identity between the myth-motifs of descent into the depths of a dark watery abyss and the descent into the subterranean underworld (i.e., Hades or Hell).<\/p>\n
Many heroes take this night-sea journey into the depths.\u00a0 For one example, the Celtic hero Tristan undertakes a night-sea journey to Ireland in a boat lacking oars or sails.\u00a0 There he undergoes a miraculous rebirth from a magic wound, a wound that does not heal, with the help of his mortal enemy, Isolde, the sorceress queen of Ireland (see Bedier, 1945; Boyer, 2011). Another of the great mythic heroes whose journey takes the form of a water journey into the depths of the night sea is the Greek hero Odysseus (the Roman, Ulysses), the protagonist of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, the epic story of arguably the longest sea voyage depicted in world literature.\u00a0 Significantly, Dante meets Ulysses in the depths of Hades-Hell, where Ulysses narrates a part of his journey, evoking imagery of his own night-sea adventure in the depths.\u00a0 \u201cSince we\u2019d begun our Jules Verne journey,\u201d says Ulysses in Bangs\u2019 poetic modern translation (2012, pp. 248-251), alluding to the modern literary version of a submarine journey in the depths authored by Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.<\/em><\/p>\nOne of the most illustrative mythic portrayals of the nekyia<\/em> as night-sea journey is the ancient tale of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, \u201can old story\/but one that can still be told\/About a man who loved\/And lost a friend to death\/And learned he lacked the power\/To bring him back to life\u201d (Mason, 1972, p. 11).\u00a0 When Gilgamesh\u2019s best friend, the wild man Enkidu, dies, the archetypal hero descends into the Sumerian underworld. There he undergoes a perilous night-sea journey through the underworld to find the secret of immortality that might bring Enkidu back to life.\u00a0 Ferried across the dark \u201csea of death\u201d in the boat of Urshanabi, the Sumerian Charon, Gilgamesh quests to obtain this secret power of rebirth from the immortal Utnapishtim, an archetypal blind seer figure (like the Greek, Tiresias) who lives on the other shore of the underworld.\u00a0 His hero quest fails when a mythical serpent eats the plant of immortality, acquiring miraculous powers symbolically portrayed as the serpent\u2019s ability to periodically slough its skin and be continuously reborn (p. 86). This myth features an amplification of death-rebirth imagery observable in both the structural topographical landscape or background setting (i.e., night-sea, underworld) of the tale, and in the story\u2019s detailed foreground imagery as well (i.e., the serpent\u2019s power of cyclical rebirth bestowed by the plant of immortality).<\/p>\nIn The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, the hero Dante, accompanied by his guide, the shade of Virgil, begins the next stage of his adventure of descent, evoking Gilgamesh, with this archetypal imagery as its setting.\u00a0 No sooner do Virgil and Dante pass into the \u201cCity of Woe,\u201d the \u201cGrave Cave\u201d of \u201ceverlasting sadness,\u201d the place of \u201cno hope\u201d\u2014the \u201cplace where you\u2019d see the wretched dead\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 33)\u2014<\/strong>than their night-sea journey begins.\u00a0 \u201cThen we crossed over from where we\u2019d been\/Into the inner sanctum that houses hidden things.\u201d\u00a0 There they observe a huge crowd of shades on the banks of a wide river, the river Acheron (p. 35)\u2014that underworld body of water that acts as a boundary between limbo and the realm of Hades-Hell proper.\u00a0 In Dante\u2019s tale, Acheron\u2014\u201cSad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 138; Milton, 1982, p. 85)\u2014is a type of liminal threshold the hero must pass to enter what Campbell (1949\/1973) calls \u201cthe zone of magnified power\u201d (Campbell, p. 69-89; Boyer, 2014a, pp. 23-27).\u00a0 From the shore, the pilgrims notice a boat that appears in the shadowy distance bearing an \u201cOld Man\/With white hair\u201d who will take them in his boat to the \u201cother side,\/Where you\u2019ll eat and drink of perpetual darkness\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 35).\u00a0 This old man is Charon, the boatman (p. 36), artistically depicted by Dore in the iconographic illustration above (see Fig. 2), one of the most beautiful and potent visual images of the night-sea journey motif ever portrayed in pictorial art.<\/p>\nFurthermore, Charon is only the first of many such archetypal threshold guardians<\/em> or shadow presences<\/em> (Campbell, 1949\/1973, p. 245; Boyer, 2014a, pp. 31\u201335) encountered by the hero Dante in his journey into the depths.\u00a0 Threshold guardians are recurring figures in hero myths, as Campbell noted, important figures illustrating his hero quest paradigm, the leitmotif of the monomyth<\/em> (Campbell, p. 30).\u00a0 This archetypal figure appears, in a wide variety of guises, throughout Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>.\u00a0 The motif of threshold guardian (or gatekeeper) is explicitly rendered in the passage in Inferno<\/em> in which a \u201cheaven-sent messenger\u201d allows Dante and Virgil to enter the underworld City of Dis.\u00a0 \u201cHe came to the gate \u2026,\u201d Dante narrates. \u201cHe spoke from the horrible threshold\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 90).\u00a0 While most hero quests feature one, two, or perhaps a handful of threshold guardian figures, Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em>\u2014starting with Inferno<\/em>\u2014represents an exhaustive series of threshold passages, liminal passages between the worlds in which a parade of threshold guardians appear at various stages of the nekyia.<\/em>\u00a0 This begins with the boatman Charon, followed by \u201cHideous Minos [who] stands snarling at the entrance\u201d (p. 53), the \u201csavage and bestial\u201d Cerberus (p. 63), the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology, as well as the Minotaur (p. 111), the Harpies (p. 121), and a host of other threshold guardians the hero Dante encounters on his downward passage descending through the circles of the underworld.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Fig-3e-300x235.jpg\")
<\/a>Fig. 3. The boatman Phlegyas ferries Dante and Virgil over the River Styx in the depths of the netherworld. Earlier in the narrative, they are ferried by another boatman, Charon. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n
The night-sea passage ends when Dante and Virgil complete their crossing over the murky water, landing on the far bank of the \u201cpitch-dark plain\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 37). \u00a0But in a rare example in mythic narrative, Dante describes a second<\/em> night sea journey that further amplifies the crossing of the Acheron.\u00a0 After meeting Pluto\u2014another threshold guardian or \u201centrance guard\u201d (p. 68) to the fourth circle of Hell (in Roman myth, the god of the underworld himself)\u2014the pilgrims come to a trench, the \u201cdeep-charcoal slope\/Where the water becomes the marsh of the Styx\u201d (p. 74).\u00a0 They circle the marsh where, at the beginning of Canto VIII, Virgil spies a second mythical boatman, Phlegyas, as he approaches \u201cacross the pond\u2019s dirty water\u201d (p. 79) in a small skiff.\u00a0 \u201cAs we took our seats and settle in\/The worn prow took off, cutting a deeper wake\u201d (p.80).\u00a0 This motif is again beautifully illustrated by Dore, whose imagery also explicitly illustrates that the nature of the nekyia<\/em> journey is a descent into the Land of the Dead.\u00a0 In fact, almost the entire Inferno<\/em>, spanning hundreds of pages, is an adventure set in the realm of departed spirits, Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts,\u201d the character Dante being the only mortal in the tale.<\/p>\nThe pilgrims pass quickly in Charon\u2019s boat over the \u201cdead mill pond\u201d (Bang, 2012, p.80) when a spirit surfaces from beneath the muddy water and demands that Dante identify himself. \u201cWho are you?\u201d demands the shade.\u00a0 This archetypal question of the hero\u2019s identity recurs frequently throughout The Comedy<\/em> (e.g., Inferno,<\/em> see Bang, 2012, pp. 220, 238, and 258), a motif related to the archetypal figure of the hero-as-orphan.\u00a0 This question of identity offers an important clue to the nature of the quest as an archetypal origin myth of the hero (Boyer, 2011; 2012; 2014a).\u00a0 Early in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, this idea of the character Dante as archetypal or mythic orphan<\/em> is subtly suggested when Virgil refers to Dante as his \u201cfoster-son\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 70), a characterization of the relationship between Virgil and Dante repeated throughout the narrative in their dialogue, referring to each other, respectively, as \u201cfather\u201d and \u201cson.\u201d\u00a0 This symbolic figure of the archetypal orphan is a ubiquitous if not essential feature in stories of heroes who descend into the forested, watery, and subterranean depths of the other world.<\/p>\nTo return to Dante\u2019s narrative, Phlegyas, after circling the marsh in the skiff, sits the pilgrims down at the entrance to the underworld City of Dis, the city where the god of the underworld, Dis or Satan, dwells.\u00a0 Here Dante and Virgil encounter yet another threshold guardian personified as the Erinyes of Greek myth.\u00a0 Here at the threshold entering Satan\u2019s City, \u201cthere rose up three-Hell-bent blood-streaked Furies\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 88).<\/p>\n
Dante\u2019s subterranean descent into the underworld of Hades-Hell. <\/strong>With the crossing of the Acheron, the protagonist-hero Dante initiates the lengthy pilgrimage into the depths of the underworld common to myriad mythic heroes before and since.\u00a0 This is the deep, dark topographical landscape of the underworld portrayed metaphorically as a subterranean <\/em>route, a passage down into the depths of the world below the terrestrial surface of the earth.\u00a0 In Jung\u2019s view, this is the well-known nekyia<\/em> or katabasis<\/em> journey so often described in Greek myths, where heroes from Theseus to Heracles\u2014as Bang (2012, p. 92) acknowledged in her notes to Canto X\u2014journey down into the shadowy depths of the cave-world imagined below Earth\u2019s crust.\u00a0 In Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, the hero Odysseus journeys into watery depths to meet his dead parents\u2014again, the imagery of dark depths as Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014and the archetypal blind seer and prophet, Tiresias.\u00a0 In Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>, a Christian theological reinterpretation of The Aeneid<\/em>, the character Dante journeys\u2014having crossed the night-seas of Acheron and Styx\u2014with the shade of the dead poet Virgil into the subterranean underworld realm of Death, occupied by legions of spirits and shades encountered along the way.<\/p>\n![\"Dante](\"https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Fig-4e-240x300.jpg\")
<\/a>Fig. 4. Virgil and Dante descend into the depths of the mythic underworld of Hades (or \u201cHell,\u201d in the Christian conception inspired by Dante). Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cI found myself on the brink\/Of a deep and melancholy chasm\/\u2026so dark and deep and impenetrable that\/I couldn\u2019t identify anything\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 41).\u00a0 Gazing down into this ink-dark, unfathomable abyss, Virgil summoned his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and companion to follow him.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s how we\u2019ll descend into the unlit world below\u201d (p. 41).\u00a0 Practically from beginning to end, Dante\u2019s journey in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em> is explicitly downward, a journey of descent\u2014to borrow Campbell\u2019s term, downgoing<\/em>\u2014through nine descending circles of Hell.\u00a0 Dante was apparently deliberate[5]<\/sup><\/a> in his crafted imitations of the directional, topographical landscape through which he (as character) made his way.\u00a0 In the above passage, the author specifically described his character\u2019s trajectory as a journey of descent; he and Virgil are about to \u201cdescend\u201d into the \u201cunlit world below.\u201d And throughout their journey into the depths of the dark abyss, Dante the author refers to the adventure using similar terms.\u00a0 For one example, in Canto VII, when Virgil\u2014after comforting Dante that the threshold guardian, Pluto, cannot prevent their journey \u201cdown this rock\u201d\u2014turns to Pluto and upbraids him: \u201cThere is a reason we\u2019re making this descent<\/em> [italics mine]. Upstairs wants him to go down\u201d (p. 71).<\/p>\nReturning to the narrative, the pilgrims\u2014Dante and Virgil\u2014enter the \u201cfirst circle of the black abyss,\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 41) the region of limbo that lies, according to Dante the author, between Acheron and the proper entrance to Hell as underworld (p. 47).\u00a0 Such imagery of descent into a deep, dark abyss spans the succeeding 30 Cantos of The Inferno.<\/em> \u201cBelow this rock there are three more circles,\/Each one lower than the next\u201d (p. 103).\u00a0 Referring to the monster Geryon, another gatekeeper, Dante says: \u201cFrom now on, we\u2019ll always go down via escalators\/Like these\u201d (p. 161).\u00a0 He continues: \u201c[Geryon] swims on, slowly, slowly, wheeling down\/In continuous descent\u201d (p. 162).<\/p>\nIn the apocryphal tradition of Christianity, this subterranean route into the depths is suggested in the event, immediately following Jesus\u2019 crucifixion and death, where Jesus Christ\u2014like Heracles in Greek mythology, Inanna in the Descent of Inanna<\/em> (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983), and countless other heroes and gods in world mythology\u2014descended into the subterranean underworld-netherworld realm ruled by Satan, the pagan Hades-Pluto, lord of the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology.\u00a0 In Christian tradition, in which the hellish imagery of Inferno<\/em> is historically influential, the underworld of Hell is ruled by Satan.\u00a0 It is into this underworld realm of the dead that Jesus descends for the mythic three days and nights preceding the miracle of his apotheosis, resurrection,[6]<\/sup><\/a> and ascension to Heaven.\u00a0 In Christian narrative this story is referred to as Christ\u2019s \u201cHarrowing of Hell,\u201d the nearest analogue in Christian mythopoeic literature of the transformative hero journey of subterranean descent-ascent as a form of initiatory death-rebirth.\u00a0 When Jesus miraculously ascends from the underworld depths of Hell, the realm of the dead\u2014Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014he is no longer Jesus, the man, but Christ, the resurrected semi-deity (Boyer, 2014c; Boyer, 2017b), a narrative trajectory closely imitated more than a millennia later by the mythic poet and literary hero, Dante.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|off” module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_enable_color=”off” custom_padding=”4px|4px|4px|4px|true|true” border_radii=”on|6px|6px|6px|6px” border_width_all=”2px” border_color_all=”#62472a”]<\/p>\nDante\u2019s wedding of the myth-motifs of the hero quest in the depths of forests with Jung\u2019s night sea journey and the analogous myth-motif of subterranean descent into Hades\u2014\u201cthe land of ghosts \u2026 beyond this world\u201d\u2014is a rare example in literary mythology that forcefully illustrates the nearly identical motifs of Campbell\u2019s heroic wilderness landscape and Jung\u2019s thesis of symbolic identity between the myth-motifs of descent into the depths of a dark watery abyss and the descent into the subterranean underworld (i.e., Hades or Hell).<\/span><\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Concluding Discussion ” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Concluding Discussion <\/h2>\n
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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the realm of world mythology and mythopoeic literature, Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> occupies a special position in its unique artistic and literary portrayal of the mythic hero\u2019s journey of descent.\u00a0 With the exception of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s epic literary trilogy, Lord of the Rings<\/em>, perhaps no hero journey\u2019s mythopoeic landscape compares in scope to Dante\u2019s nekyia<\/em>, imagined as an epic mythic journey of descent into Jung\u2019s collective unconscious that utilizes three major archetypal routes into the underworld depths\u2014by forest, night-sea, and subterranean descent\u2014and whose entire adventure takes place in the setting of an underworld described in breathtaking scope and exhaustive detail.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, the mythic hero quest journey remains incomplete if only the journey of descent or death is described, an important limitation in a study of brief scope as presented in these pages.\u00a0 As the transformative journey of Jesus Christ in the Harrowing of Hell suggests, the descent into the underworld is merely a prelude to the story\u2019s important conclusion.\u00a0 The journey of descent sets the stage for the subsequent journey of ascent <\/em>and return<\/em> to the upper world, the semi-divine hero now transformed, regenerated, and resurrected (i.e., reborn) from death.\u00a0 In Virgil\u2019s Aeneid <\/em>(n.d.\/2006), the Sibyl of Cumae warns the hero Aeneas that the \u201cdescent to the Underworld is easy.\/Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,\/But to retrace your steps, to climb back up to the upper air\u2014\/There the struggle, there the labor lies\u201d (p. 186).<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed it is this difficult journey of return (Campbell, 1949\/1973, pp. 193-244) to the upper light\u2014the inverse of the descent in which the triumphant hero returns through a journey of ascent to the light of the ordinary but newly transformed world\u2014that makes the essential symbolic point of the tale.\u00a0 The point is not the hero\u2019s death, but the transformation<\/em> symbolized as the hero\u2019s death (in its myriad forms) followed by renewed or regenerated life (i.e., Jung\u2019s individuation process). The journey of Dante\u2019s descent explored in this study is only the first part of this narrative trajectory or story arc\u2014the tale of the hero\u2019s death or symbolic encounter with Death in the realm of the dead.\u00a0 The return trip, Dante\u2019s journey of ascent or return, begins at the conclusion of Inferno<\/em>, when the pilgrims, after encountering Satan himself, enter \u201cthat secluded passage\/That would lead us back to the lit world\u201d (Bang, 2013, 330).\u00a0 Their initial journey of ascent is extremely efficient, as Dante and Virgil climb out through a round opening to \u201conce again catch sight of the stars\u201d (p. 330).\u00a0 But this return merely marks the beginning of Dante\u2019s epic journey of ascent, a journey described in unparalleled detail and scope in The<\/em> Purgatorio<\/em> and Paradiso <\/em>that complete his remarkable tale.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the ancient myth of the goddess Inanna, one of the earliest deities whose nekyia<\/em> or mythic journey of descent, based on oral storytelling tradition, was recorded in textual form, the complete cycle of Campbell\u2019s (1949\/1973) \u201cdowngoing and upcoming\u201d is described when the goddess\u2019s father, the great god Enki, teaches Inanna about the cyclical form her journey must take.\u00a0 Her journey is concisely described in the myth: \u201cDescent into the underworld! Ascent from the underworld!\u201d (Wolkstein & Kramer, p. 15). This journey, like the path trodden by Virgil\u2019s hero Aeneas, and by Dante more than two millennia later, is a journey of transformation\u2014suffering, death, and transfiguration\u2014as psychologically relevant today as when the primordial myths of indigenous societies throughout the world were originally told.\u00a0 This archetypal journey of descent and ascent\u2014as Jung, Campbell, Mircea Eliade (1958) and scores of Jungian scholars indicate (Boyer, 2011; 2014b; 2017a; 2017b)\u2014can be interpreted as a literary expression of the presumably universal initiatory ordeal of symbolic death and rebirth told in countless local variations in the metaphorical language of psyche\u2014a mythopoeic grammar of psychological individuation and authentic human identity and wholeness expressed in ever-recurring metaphors and symbols from which mythopoeic narratives like Dante\u2019s Inferno,<\/em> and indeed the entire Divine Comedy<\/em>, are constructed.\u00a0<\/p>\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Conclusion” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]Dante\u2019s Inferno <\/em>illustrates, in late medieval mythopoeic literature, Jung\u2019s theory of the archetypal nekyia<\/em> journey of heroic descent into the depths as represented in the topographical imagery of the analogous motifs of nekyia<\/em> as night-sea journey and nekyia<\/em> as subterranean descent or descensus ad inferos.\u00a0 <\/em>Jung\u2019s views are amplified by Campbell\u2019s analogue of the hero quest into the depths of a primitive forest.\u00a0 The comprehensive scope of Dante\u2019s narrative journey into the depths\u2014pictured in these perennial, archetypal, metaphorical forms and topographical \u201cpsychic\u201d landscapes\u2014is perhaps unrivaled in world literature and mythology, with the possible exception of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/em>.\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> is a rare example of an entire detailed narrative taking place in a mythical underworld that is explicitly described as the Land of the Dead.\u00a0 <\/strong>Part 2 of this study will examine the archetypal trajectory of return or ascent to the upper air (the world of light) in Dante\u2019s epic trilogy, completing the archetypal structural narrative arc of this story, as it has in countless other mythopoetic tales across the world since beginning-less time.<\/p>\nThis paper represents the continuation of the early amplification and interpretation of archetypal material in Dante\u2019s mythopoeic literary masterpiece, exemplified by Jungian scholar Helen Luke\u2019s (1989) wonderful interpretation in From Dark Wood to White Rose<\/em> (1989).\u00a0 This interpretive excavation of Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> from the perspective of Jungian psychological criticism, suggested by Jung himself in his early career comments on Dante,[7]<\/sup><\/a> has only recently begun.\u00a0 More comprehensive interpretations of Dante\u2019s archetypal imagery along these lines seem worthy of more than one graduate thesis or doctoral dissertation.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”References” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\nReferences<\/h2>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text module_class=”reference” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n
Alighieri, D. (n.d.\/1970). The divine comedy: The inferno, the purgatorio, and the paradiso<\/em> (J. Ciardi, Trans.). New York, NY: New American Library.<\/p>\nAlighieri, D. (n.d.\/2012). Dante Alighieri:<\/em> Inferno<\/em> (M.J. Bang, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.<\/p>\nBaum, L.F. (1900). The wonderful wizard of Oz<\/em> (1st<\/sup> ed.). New York, NY: George M. Hill.<\/p>\nBedier, J. (1945). The romance of Tristan and Iseult<\/em> (H. Belloc, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon.<\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2011). Key archetypes in the Celtic myth of Tristan and Isolde: A brief introduction. <\/em>Retrieved at\u00a0https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/622341\/Key_Archetypes_in_the_Celtic_Myth_of_Tristan_and_Isolde_A_Brief_Introduction<\/a><\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2012, August). Introduction to the mythic orphan: Archetypal origins of the hero in myth, literature and film.<\/em> Paper presented at the Symposium for the Study of Myth, Santa Barbara, CA.<\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2014a). The other world of Oz: The threshold passage of Dorothy Gale. In Coreopsis: Journal of Myth & Theater, 3<\/em>(2), Spring\/Summer 2014. Retrieved at https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/7574495\/Entering_the_Other_World_of_Oz_The_Threshold_Passage_of_Dorothy_Gale<\/a><\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2014b, June). To die, and be reborn: The death-rebirth motif in myth & rite, literature & film.<\/em> Paper presented at the International Conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS), Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ.<\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2014c, November). The Gospel as transformative myth: Individuation imagery in DeMille\u2019s King of Kings<\/em>. Unpublished manuscript, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.<\/p>\nBoyer, R.L. (2017a). The rebirth archetype in fairy tales: A study of Fitcher\u2019s Bird<\/em> andLittle Red Cap<\/em>. Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theatre<\/em>, 6<\/em>(1), Spring 2017). Retrieved at\u00a0http:\/\/www.societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2017-issue\/the-rebirth-archetype-in-fairy-tales\/<\/a><\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Abstract” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.2″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n
Abstract<\/h2>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false” custom_padding=”||0px|||”]Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em> is an early masterpiece of European literature as a whole and a medieval prototype of modern mythopoeic literature. In creating his epic mythopoeic narrative, Dante utilizes widely recurring narrative metaphors and symbolic topographical motifs adapted from pre-existing mythologies to describe a mortal\u2019s mythic journey of descent into the mythical Underworld or Land of the Dead. The essay examines Dante\u2019s nekyia<\/em> or archetypal hero journey of descent into the netherworld of Dis, the archetypal Land of the Dead, led by the spirit of Virgil as they travel ever downward through the dark depths of The Inferno\u2019s<\/em> underworld landscape. The paper analyzes the poetic text of The Inferno<\/em> (augmented by the iconographic, pictorial art of Gustave Dore), focusing on symbolic, structural depth-imagery of a conventional nature in Dante\u2019s literary narrative adapted from recurring primordial images found throughout the world\u2019s mythologies and ritual narratives. The Inferno<\/em> is interpreted as a medieval literary example of mythopoeic imagery common to ancient hero myths (including The Aeneid<\/em>) and initiatory ritual schema the world over, interpreted as loci of psychological meaning in the interdisciplinary works of psychologist Carl G. Jung, mythologist Joseph Campbell, and others.<\/p>\n Keywords: <\/em>archetypes, Carl G. Jung, comparative mythology, Dante, depth psychology, Divine Comedy, iconography, Joseph Campbell, literature, mythology, nekyia[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”first section” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n The night sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos<\/em>, a descent into Hades, and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious.<\/p>\n \u2014Carl Gustav Jung<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em> (Ciardi, 1970) is an early masterpiece of world literature, an enduring perhaps immortal literary classic whose stature rivals ancient classics such as Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> (Lattimore, 1967) and Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em> (Fagles, 2010)\u2014the work upon which The Comedy<\/em> is deliberately modeled.\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> is also an early prototype of the modern literary genre referred to as mythopoeic<\/em> (or mythopoetic<\/em>) literature, as well as an example of what might be called archetypal<\/em> literature, a general category of narrative transcending specific literary and cinematic genres, for instance, the mythological and literary expressions of the hero quest myth whose symbolic structure was delineated by mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949\/1973).<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An argument can be made that Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> is an example, written in the late Middle Ages, of mythopoeic literature as a symbolic hero quest myth (Campbell) and nekyia <\/em>journey of descent (Jung).\u00a0 Mythopoeic literature[1]<\/sup><\/a> has been associated with the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings, his distinguished literary colleagues at Oxford, as well as the specific literary genres of fantasy and speculative fiction in which Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are acknowledged pioneers.\u00a0 These authors made use of pre-existing mythological elements in creating fictional narrative worlds, literary myths evoking an obviously mythic quality and making significant use of conventional features of myth-making.\u00a0 In short, authors of mythopoeic narratives utilize archetypal symbols and structure\u2014in the forms of recurring motifs and images\u2014in the creation of their tales.\u00a0 Dante uses many such mythic images in creating the imaginal realm of The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, which might also be understood as a prototype in the genre of literary horror, a sub-category of speculative and fantasy fiction.\u00a0 For example, much of Dante\u2019s subject matter in The Inferno<\/em> consists of the nearly indescribable horrors of Hell, exhaustively and terrifyingly catalogued by the author.\u00a0 This fictional portrayal influenced centuries of popular Christianity\u2019s literalistic conceptions of Hell reaching down to the present day.\u00a0 On the level of narrative craft, Dante uses the first person point of view of story narration to powerful effect, a technique of writing craft uniquely suited for horror tales in which the author, as fictitious narrator of a tale, describes fantastic realities as a form of fictional memoir, thus granting the credibility of a first- person witness account of the uncanny events related in the tale\u2014a technique used by masters of horror from G. du Maupassant (e.g., The Horla, <\/em>1989) to H.P. Lovecraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Smooth-Wind-e.png” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ hover_enabled=”0″][\/et_pb_image][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Jungian Theory” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]While an argument can be made for Dante\u2019s tale as an early masterpiece of horror\u2014for nowhere in the annals of world literature are the ghastly nightmarish horrors of Hell more vividly and exhaustively described by any poet than in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>\u2014the focus of this exploration is on the narrative\u2019s more universal, indigenous pagan symbolism, viewed as a locus of psychological meaning.\u00a0 Rather than reaching forward from literature of the Middle Ages to the present, the study takes a backwards glance at Dante\u2019s masterpiece, emphasizing its symbolic and structural roots in myths the world over, expressed in the primordial imagery upon which the modern mythopoeic genre is based.\u00a0 After all, the Greek word mythopoeia<\/em> means mythmaking<\/em>, and it is in this universal, timeless symbolic language of myth\u2014the poetic grammar of recurring metaphors, symbols, images, and motifs\u2014that the underlying elements of mythmaking are found.<\/p>\n These roots of mythopoeic storytelling are evident in the symbolic forms and structural elements of storytelling narrative, whether mythic, literary, or cinematic.\u00a0 To speak metaphorically, the language of mythic narrative is constructed of an archetypal <\/em>alphabet consisting of symbolic imagery, as the analyst Carl G. Jung[2]<\/sup><\/a> discovered, the building blocks of mythopoeic forms.\u00a0 Mythic language is a language rich in poetic, symbolic forms, that is, the imagery of metaphor and simile.\u00a0 For such reasons, archetypal literary theorist and myth-critic Northrop Frye (1963) viewed the whole of world literature as \u201cdisplaced mythology\u201d (pp. 21-38).\u00a0 Jung posited a collective unconscious<\/em>, a timeless and universal psyche, as the source of these images appearing in myth, literature, and other forms. The unconscious psyche, Jung suggested, possesses the capacity to represent \u201caffect laden situations\u201d poetically and symbolically in a universal \u201cpicture language\u201d of \u201cmyth-motifs\u201d that, following Plato and others, he called archetypes<\/em>.\u00a0 Archetypes, rooted in the instincts and human biology, are presumably universal, according to Jung, and transcend time and space.\u00a0 In short, these primordial images<\/em> appear everywhere, in all times and places, with analogous imagery found in the creation myths and hero myths of the world, folklore and fairytale, the arts and religion, as well as in the dreams and imaginative fantasies of contemporary individuals, including psychotics and creative artists (like Dante).<\/p>\n Jung noticed that the same images he observed in myth, fairytales, and visual arts appeared in his own dreams and fantasies, as well as those of his patients.\u00a0 This observation of analogous imagery appearing repeatedly and spontaneously in distant times and places too historically and geographically remote to have been disseminated by cultural diffusion, led to Jung\u2019s theory of the archetypes.\u00a0 His observations of repetitive image-patterns eventually evolved into Jung\u2019s\u00a0 interpretive analytical methodology called amplification<\/em> or analogical <\/em>thinking, which consisted chiefly of noticing patterns of analogous imagery wherever they appear, used as tools for understanding unconscious psychic processes in his patients.\u00a0 Jung defined these archetypal primordial images or symbolic myth-motifs as \u201cforms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin\u201d (Jung, 1958, pp. 83\u201384).<\/p>\n These recurring primordial images are the presumptively universal elements of a symbolic alphabet from which the language of myth evolves in derivative storytelling forms, including literary and film narratives. The images are like letters forming, collectively, the symbolic alphabet from which the language of mythopoeic narrative is constructed\u2014including, as will be demonstrated shortly, Dante\u2019s Comedy.\u00a0 <\/em>Jung\u2019s primordial images or myth-motifs function as the fundamental metaphorical building blocks of myth, familiar to storytellers, myth-makers, and their audiences since primordial pasts, when shamans of indigenous tribal peoples everywhere invented metaphors for describing otherwise inexpressible experiential realities, beginning with the cosmogonies and origin myths passed down through oral traditions and sacred rites since the beginning-less past.<\/p>\n In this study, a textual analysis and archetypal interpretation of Dante\u2019s journey in The Inferno <\/em>is approached through the interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework created by Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, emphasizing the mythopoeic nature of The<\/em> Comedy<\/em> evidenced in its root-meaning of primordial, archetypal transformational imagery of descent-return as initiatory death-rebirth (Boyer, 2014b; Boyer, 2017a; Boyer 2017b).\u00a0 This study focuses on structural imagery of an archetypal-mythopoeic nature in Dante\u2019s narrative, interpreted as symbolic of presumptively universal unconscious psychological transformative processes (Jung\u2019s nekyia<\/em> or journey of symbolic descent into the depths and Land of the Dead), rather than on features of the story that are merely local and historical, that is, its specifically medieval European Christianity-based interpretive framework.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|off” module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_enable_color=”off” custom_padding=”4px|4px|4px|4px|true|true” border_radii=”on|6px|6px|6px|6px” border_width_all=”2px” border_color_all=”#62472a”]<\/p>\n The unconscious psyche, Jung suggested, possesses the capacity to represent \u201caffect laden situations\u201d poetically and symbolically in a universal \u201cpicture language\u201d of \u201cmyth-motifs\u201d that, following Plato and others, he called archetypes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Depth Imagery” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Depth Imagery” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n Dante utilized widely recurring visual and narrative metaphors and motifs in describing his journey into Hell, imagery found in abundance in the world\u2019s mythology and ritual narratives common to pre-literate indigenous societies everywhere.\u00a0 Dante crafted his uniquely historical Christian theological interpretation, and political critique of the Church and various powers of his day, on a mythic symbolic superstructure of pagan imagery that is undoubtedly primordial and presumably universal in origin.\u00a0 This mythic symbolism is widely evident in Dante\u2019s trilogy, beginning with the conventional topographical imagery of the initial stage of the hero journey, the archetypal journey of descent into the depths.<\/p>\n Dante\u2019s hero descent into the depths of a dusky wood.<\/strong>\u00a0 \u201cStopped mid-motion in the middle\/Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky\u2014\/Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 15).[3]<\/sup><\/a> These opening lines of Dante\u2019s Inferno,<\/em> the first book in his epic trilogy, The Divine Comedy<\/em>, are some of the most memorable lines in all of world literature. Readers meet the character \u201cDante,\u201d the narrative hero of The Comedy<\/em>, already lost in the dark depths of his unconscious life, represented by the author<\/em> Dante using the timeless metaphorical myth-motif of a dense, sunless forest. \u201cIt is difficult to describe a forest:\/Savage, arduous, extreme in its extremity\u201d (p. 154). In Dante\u2019s story, this primitive \u201cdusky wood\u201d is the shadowy archetypal landscape through which the hero passes fully \u201cinto the depths of the abyss\u201d (p. 154).<\/p>\n Fig. 1. Dante initiates his journey by entering the symbolic depths of a dark, \u201cdusky\u201d wood. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n This image of a primeval forest is a typical and widely distributed topographical symbol evident in Indo-European myths, for example, those of the Celts. These ancient narratives depict the stories of the gods, kings, and heroes of mythic Ireland, Britain, and beyond. For instance, semi-divine Celtic heroes like Pwyll (Ford, 1977, pp. 35-56) undertook perilous adventures in the liminal other world<\/em>, frequently described as hunting expeditions into a densely forested wilderness.\u00a0 This ancient imagery reappears in medieval Celtic Romance literature, where King Arthur, Parsifal, and the knights of the Grail quest typically initiate their quests by entering a pathless path<\/em> into a deep forest, one of Campbell\u2019s favorite depth motifs.<\/p>\n This myth-motif is also common to Indo-European folk and fairytales, where child-heroes from Hansel and Gretel<\/em> to Red Riding Hood<\/em> (Boyer, 2017a) venture into the depths of enchanted forests, where they typically encounter monstrous supernatural figures (e.g., wolves, witches, etc.) who threaten to devour them.\u00a0 A wonderfully illustrative example of the hero descent into the depths by way of forest appears in the \u201cmodernized fairytale\u201d by L. Frank Baum (1900), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>, where Dorothy Gale\u2019s nekyia<\/em> journey of descent in Oz is portrayed as a series of descents into increasingly dark and frightening woods. In the deepest, darkest forest, the heroine enters the symbolic Land of the Dead in the form of a Haunted Forest where the Cowardly Lion declares: \u201cI do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks.\u201d In the depths of the Haunted Forest\u2014a symbolic Jungian \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014Dorothy is abducted to Hades-like depths, imagined as a desolate shadowy wasteland ,where she is imprisoned in the castle of her supernatural nemesis, the Queen of the Underworld represented as the Wicked Witch of the West.<\/p>\n When readers first meet the character Dante in the dusky forest, the hero is already situated in archetypal landscape, a dark and deep otherworldly wilderness through which he must find his way back to the daylight world.\u00a0 Like Dorothy Gale and the questing knights of the Grail, Dante moves through this thickly forested landscape, analogous to the journeys of countless mythic heroes before and after.\u00a0 The image of a dense, dark forest where the hero is lost functions as a powerful visual metaphor for the descent into Jung\u2019s collective unconscious, the primordial realm of archetypes. The heroes of countless mythic narratives personify this encounter with the unknown, described as a symbolic transformative journey across an archetypal magical landscape in an \u201cotherworld\u201d in some form.\u00a0 As archetypal psychologist James Hillman (1979, p. 51) suggested, they move from material to psychical<\/em> space, to the \u201cland of soul.\u201d As a topographical metaphor, the deep dark forest motif can be interpreted consistently, as Campbell suggested, as an image of psychic depths.\u00a0 From the viewpoint of Jung and scholars influenced by his work, including Campbell, this encounter with unknown powers in the dark depths of the forest may be understood as a reflection, in the dark mirror of art, of every individual\u2019s mysterious inner<\/em> journeys into the unknown, as metaphors for unconscious, deep psychic processes of transformation described as the process of individuation<\/em>, Jung\u2019s term for what he viewed as the ultimate aim of human life.\u00a0 For both Jung and Campbell, this journey is interpreted as a perilous road of trials<\/em>.\u00a0 As he prepared to follow Virgil on this descending path, Dante appropriately referred to the adventure ahead as a trial, a \u201cdifficult task\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 25).<\/p>\n Significantly, in terms of both Jung\u2019s and Campbell\u2019s interpretations, Dante encounters the dead poet Virgil early in his journey into the depths. Virgil tells the hero that he\u2019ll \u201cplay the part of \u2026 guide\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 18).\u00a0 Virgil\u2019s shade becomes Dante\u2019s guide and protector in the netherworld of The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, functioning as psychopomp, Dante\u2019s guide through the underworld, as the Sibyl of Cumae did for the hero Aeneas in Virgil\u2019s Aeneid <\/em>(a.d.\/2006).\u00a0 Virgil also functions in Dante\u2019s narrative as the \u201csupernatural ally\u201d Campbell typically observed in archetypal hero quests.\u00a0 \u201cThe first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure,\u201d said Campbell (1949\/1973, p. 69). Virgil, as this protective guide, personifies the \u201cbenign protecting power of destiny\u201d (p. 71).[4]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 In Jungian terms, Virgil represents the archetypal Wise Old Man, a personification of the Self, a figure Jung considered a major archetype.<\/p>\n Virgil, as Wise Old Man in Dante\u2019s poetic narrative, is Dante\u2019s teacher and mentor on the journey, until he leaves Dante with Beatrice in The<\/em> Purgatorio <\/em>(Ciardi, 1970), Dante\u2019s feminine supernatural ally and protective guide in the tale.\u00a0 In Jung\u2019s terms, this larger-than-life anima <\/em>figure in Dante\u2019s tale looms in the narrative background, beckoning and inspiring\u2014in the form of poetic Muse\u2014Dante\u2019s journey as both author and character.\u00a0 Such figures, which personify the Self, the anima, etc., are, according to Jung, among the key archetypal characters found in myths throughout the world\u2014along with the archetypal Shadow, in this tale represented by a multitude of dark spirits and damned figures the hero meets on his journey, including Satan himself. These larger-than-life figures are encountered, Jung added, in the transformative imagery of the individuation process, a psychological process analogous to journeys of heroic descent and symbolically depicted in a variety of ways in the fairytales and myths of the world.<\/p>\n Fig. 2. Upon entrance to the underworld, Dante and Virgil begin a night-sea journey when the boatman of the underworld, Charon, approaches to take them to the Other Shore. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n Dante\u2019s descent pictured as Jung\u2019s night-sea journey. <\/strong>Both Freud and Jung observed a phenomenon they refer to as an over-determination<\/em> of symbols in dreams, creative fantasies, and the narrative representations of myth.\u00a0 It is as if the unconscious, the presumed source of creativity and symbolic language in depth psychology, reinforces the imagery so that multiple symbolic images in the content of a given dream or work of art possess complementary and analogous meanings that reinforce and amplify its symbolic message.\u00a0 The hero journey into the depths of the forest, a common myth-motif in folk and fairytales and myths the world over, is echoed in the analogous metaphorical imagery of what Jung calls the \u201cnight sea journey,\u201d a journey into the dark night and depths of a watery abyss.\u00a0 As Jung\u2019s opening epigraph suggests, the \u201cnight sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos<\/em>, a descent into Hades, and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious\u201d (Jung, 1946\/1992, pp. 83\u201384).<\/p>\n Dante\u2019s wedding of the myth-motifs of the hero quest in the depths of forests with Jung\u2019s night sea journey and the analogous myth-motif of subterranean descent into Hades\u2014\u201cthe land of ghosts \u2026 beyond this world\u201d\u2014is a rare example in literary mythology that forcefully illustrates the nearly identical motifs of Campbell\u2019s heroic wilderness landscape and Jung\u2019s thesis of symbolic identity between the myth-motifs of descent into the depths of a dark watery abyss and the descent into the subterranean underworld (i.e., Hades or Hell).<\/p>\n Many heroes take this night-sea journey into the depths.\u00a0 For one example, the Celtic hero Tristan undertakes a night-sea journey to Ireland in a boat lacking oars or sails.\u00a0 There he undergoes a miraculous rebirth from a magic wound, a wound that does not heal, with the help of his mortal enemy, Isolde, the sorceress queen of Ireland (see Bedier, 1945; Boyer, 2011). Another of the great mythic heroes whose journey takes the form of a water journey into the depths of the night sea is the Greek hero Odysseus (the Roman, Ulysses), the protagonist of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, the epic story of arguably the longest sea voyage depicted in world literature.\u00a0 Significantly, Dante meets Ulysses in the depths of Hades-Hell, where Ulysses narrates a part of his journey, evoking imagery of his own night-sea adventure in the depths.\u00a0 \u201cSince we\u2019d begun our Jules Verne journey,\u201d says Ulysses in Bangs\u2019 poetic modern translation (2012, pp. 248-251), alluding to the modern literary version of a submarine journey in the depths authored by Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the most illustrative mythic portrayals of the nekyia<\/em> as night-sea journey is the ancient tale of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, \u201can old story\/but one that can still be told\/About a man who loved\/And lost a friend to death\/And learned he lacked the power\/To bring him back to life\u201d (Mason, 1972, p. 11).\u00a0 When Gilgamesh\u2019s best friend, the wild man Enkidu, dies, the archetypal hero descends into the Sumerian underworld. There he undergoes a perilous night-sea journey through the underworld to find the secret of immortality that might bring Enkidu back to life.\u00a0 Ferried across the dark \u201csea of death\u201d in the boat of Urshanabi, the Sumerian Charon, Gilgamesh quests to obtain this secret power of rebirth from the immortal Utnapishtim, an archetypal blind seer figure (like the Greek, Tiresias) who lives on the other shore of the underworld.\u00a0 His hero quest fails when a mythical serpent eats the plant of immortality, acquiring miraculous powers symbolically portrayed as the serpent\u2019s ability to periodically slough its skin and be continuously reborn (p. 86). This myth features an amplification of death-rebirth imagery observable in both the structural topographical landscape or background setting (i.e., night-sea, underworld) of the tale, and in the story\u2019s detailed foreground imagery as well (i.e., the serpent\u2019s power of cyclical rebirth bestowed by the plant of immortality).<\/p>\n In The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, the hero Dante, accompanied by his guide, the shade of Virgil, begins the next stage of his adventure of descent, evoking Gilgamesh, with this archetypal imagery as its setting.\u00a0 No sooner do Virgil and Dante pass into the \u201cCity of Woe,\u201d the \u201cGrave Cave\u201d of \u201ceverlasting sadness,\u201d the place of \u201cno hope\u201d\u2014the \u201cplace where you\u2019d see the wretched dead\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 33)\u2014<\/strong>than their night-sea journey begins.\u00a0 \u201cThen we crossed over from where we\u2019d been\/Into the inner sanctum that houses hidden things.\u201d\u00a0 There they observe a huge crowd of shades on the banks of a wide river, the river Acheron (p. 35)\u2014that underworld body of water that acts as a boundary between limbo and the realm of Hades-Hell proper.\u00a0 In Dante\u2019s tale, Acheron\u2014\u201cSad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 138; Milton, 1982, p. 85)\u2014is a type of liminal threshold the hero must pass to enter what Campbell (1949\/1973) calls \u201cthe zone of magnified power\u201d (Campbell, p. 69-89; Boyer, 2014a, pp. 23-27).\u00a0 From the shore, the pilgrims notice a boat that appears in the shadowy distance bearing an \u201cOld Man\/With white hair\u201d who will take them in his boat to the \u201cother side,\/Where you\u2019ll eat and drink of perpetual darkness\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 35).\u00a0 This old man is Charon, the boatman (p. 36), artistically depicted by Dore in the iconographic illustration above (see Fig. 2), one of the most beautiful and potent visual images of the night-sea journey motif ever portrayed in pictorial art.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Charon is only the first of many such archetypal threshold guardians<\/em> or shadow presences<\/em> (Campbell, 1949\/1973, p. 245; Boyer, 2014a, pp. 31\u201335) encountered by the hero Dante in his journey into the depths.\u00a0 Threshold guardians are recurring figures in hero myths, as Campbell noted, important figures illustrating his hero quest paradigm, the leitmotif of the monomyth<\/em> (Campbell, p. 30).\u00a0 This archetypal figure appears, in a wide variety of guises, throughout Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>.\u00a0 The motif of threshold guardian (or gatekeeper) is explicitly rendered in the passage in Inferno<\/em> in which a \u201cheaven-sent messenger\u201d allows Dante and Virgil to enter the underworld City of Dis.\u00a0 \u201cHe came to the gate \u2026,\u201d Dante narrates. \u201cHe spoke from the horrible threshold\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 90).\u00a0 While most hero quests feature one, two, or perhaps a handful of threshold guardian figures, Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em>\u2014starting with Inferno<\/em>\u2014represents an exhaustive series of threshold passages, liminal passages between the worlds in which a parade of threshold guardians appear at various stages of the nekyia.<\/em>\u00a0 This begins with the boatman Charon, followed by \u201cHideous Minos [who] stands snarling at the entrance\u201d (p. 53), the \u201csavage and bestial\u201d Cerberus (p. 63), the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology, as well as the Minotaur (p. 111), the Harpies (p. 121), and a host of other threshold guardians the hero Dante encounters on his downward passage descending through the circles of the underworld.<\/p>\n Fig. 3. The boatman Phlegyas ferries Dante and Virgil over the River Styx in the depths of the netherworld. Earlier in the narrative, they are ferried by another boatman, Charon. Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n The night-sea passage ends when Dante and Virgil complete their crossing over the murky water, landing on the far bank of the \u201cpitch-dark plain\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 37). \u00a0But in a rare example in mythic narrative, Dante describes a second<\/em> night sea journey that further amplifies the crossing of the Acheron.\u00a0 After meeting Pluto\u2014another threshold guardian or \u201centrance guard\u201d (p. 68) to the fourth circle of Hell (in Roman myth, the god of the underworld himself)\u2014the pilgrims come to a trench, the \u201cdeep-charcoal slope\/Where the water becomes the marsh of the Styx\u201d (p. 74).\u00a0 They circle the marsh where, at the beginning of Canto VIII, Virgil spies a second mythical boatman, Phlegyas, as he approaches \u201cacross the pond\u2019s dirty water\u201d (p. 79) in a small skiff.\u00a0 \u201cAs we took our seats and settle in\/The worn prow took off, cutting a deeper wake\u201d (p.80).\u00a0 This motif is again beautifully illustrated by Dore, whose imagery also explicitly illustrates that the nature of the nekyia<\/em> journey is a descent into the Land of the Dead.\u00a0 In fact, almost the entire Inferno<\/em>, spanning hundreds of pages, is an adventure set in the realm of departed spirits, Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts,\u201d the character Dante being the only mortal in the tale.<\/p>\n The pilgrims pass quickly in Charon\u2019s boat over the \u201cdead mill pond\u201d (Bang, 2012, p.80) when a spirit surfaces from beneath the muddy water and demands that Dante identify himself. \u201cWho are you?\u201d demands the shade.\u00a0 This archetypal question of the hero\u2019s identity recurs frequently throughout The Comedy<\/em> (e.g., Inferno,<\/em> see Bang, 2012, pp. 220, 238, and 258), a motif related to the archetypal figure of the hero-as-orphan.\u00a0 This question of identity offers an important clue to the nature of the quest as an archetypal origin myth of the hero (Boyer, 2011; 2012; 2014a).\u00a0 Early in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em>, this idea of the character Dante as archetypal or mythic orphan<\/em> is subtly suggested when Virgil refers to Dante as his \u201cfoster-son\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 70), a characterization of the relationship between Virgil and Dante repeated throughout the narrative in their dialogue, referring to each other, respectively, as \u201cfather\u201d and \u201cson.\u201d\u00a0 This symbolic figure of the archetypal orphan is a ubiquitous if not essential feature in stories of heroes who descend into the forested, watery, and subterranean depths of the other world.<\/p>\n To return to Dante\u2019s narrative, Phlegyas, after circling the marsh in the skiff, sits the pilgrims down at the entrance to the underworld City of Dis, the city where the god of the underworld, Dis or Satan, dwells.\u00a0 Here Dante and Virgil encounter yet another threshold guardian personified as the Erinyes of Greek myth.\u00a0 Here at the threshold entering Satan\u2019s City, \u201cthere rose up three-Hell-bent blood-streaked Furies\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 88).<\/p>\n Dante\u2019s subterranean descent into the underworld of Hades-Hell. <\/strong>With the crossing of the Acheron, the protagonist-hero Dante initiates the lengthy pilgrimage into the depths of the underworld common to myriad mythic heroes before and since.\u00a0 This is the deep, dark topographical landscape of the underworld portrayed metaphorically as a subterranean <\/em>route, a passage down into the depths of the world below the terrestrial surface of the earth.\u00a0 In Jung\u2019s view, this is the well-known nekyia<\/em> or katabasis<\/em> journey so often described in Greek myths, where heroes from Theseus to Heracles\u2014as Bang (2012, p. 92) acknowledged in her notes to Canto X\u2014journey down into the shadowy depths of the cave-world imagined below Earth\u2019s crust.\u00a0 In Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, the hero Odysseus journeys into watery depths to meet his dead parents\u2014again, the imagery of dark depths as Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014and the archetypal blind seer and prophet, Tiresias.\u00a0 In Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>, a Christian theological reinterpretation of The Aeneid<\/em>, the character Dante journeys\u2014having crossed the night-seas of Acheron and Styx\u2014with the shade of the dead poet Virgil into the subterranean underworld realm of Death, occupied by legions of spirits and shades encountered along the way.<\/p>\n Fig. 4. Virgil and Dante descend into the depths of the mythic underworld of Hades (or \u201cHell,\u201d in the Christian conception inspired by Dante). Illustration by Gustave Dore, published 1861.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cI found myself on the brink\/Of a deep and melancholy chasm\/\u2026so dark and deep and impenetrable that\/I couldn\u2019t identify anything\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 41).\u00a0 Gazing down into this ink-dark, unfathomable abyss, Virgil summoned his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and companion to follow him.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s how we\u2019ll descend into the unlit world below\u201d (p. 41).\u00a0 Practically from beginning to end, Dante\u2019s journey in The<\/em> Inferno<\/em> is explicitly downward, a journey of descent\u2014to borrow Campbell\u2019s term, downgoing<\/em>\u2014through nine descending circles of Hell.\u00a0 Dante was apparently deliberate[5]<\/sup><\/a> in his crafted imitations of the directional, topographical landscape through which he (as character) made his way.\u00a0 In the above passage, the author specifically described his character\u2019s trajectory as a journey of descent; he and Virgil are about to \u201cdescend\u201d into the \u201cunlit world below.\u201d And throughout their journey into the depths of the dark abyss, Dante the author refers to the adventure using similar terms.\u00a0 For one example, in Canto VII, when Virgil\u2014after comforting Dante that the threshold guardian, Pluto, cannot prevent their journey \u201cdown this rock\u201d\u2014turns to Pluto and upbraids him: \u201cThere is a reason we\u2019re making this descent<\/em> [italics mine]. Upstairs wants him to go down\u201d (p. 71).<\/p>\n Returning to the narrative, the pilgrims\u2014Dante and Virgil\u2014enter the \u201cfirst circle of the black abyss,\u201d (Bang, 2012, p. 41) the region of limbo that lies, according to Dante the author, between Acheron and the proper entrance to Hell as underworld (p. 47).\u00a0 Such imagery of descent into a deep, dark abyss spans the succeeding 30 Cantos of The Inferno.<\/em> \u201cBelow this rock there are three more circles,\/Each one lower than the next\u201d (p. 103).\u00a0 Referring to the monster Geryon, another gatekeeper, Dante says: \u201cFrom now on, we\u2019ll always go down via escalators\/Like these\u201d (p. 161).\u00a0 He continues: \u201c[Geryon] swims on, slowly, slowly, wheeling down\/In continuous descent\u201d (p. 162).<\/p>\n In the apocryphal tradition of Christianity, this subterranean route into the depths is suggested in the event, immediately following Jesus\u2019 crucifixion and death, where Jesus Christ\u2014like Heracles in Greek mythology, Inanna in the Descent of Inanna<\/em> (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983), and countless other heroes and gods in world mythology\u2014descended into the subterranean underworld-netherworld realm ruled by Satan, the pagan Hades-Pluto, lord of the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology.\u00a0 In Christian tradition, in which the hellish imagery of Inferno<\/em> is historically influential, the underworld of Hell is ruled by Satan.\u00a0 It is into this underworld realm of the dead that Jesus descends for the mythic three days and nights preceding the miracle of his apotheosis, resurrection,[6]<\/sup><\/a> and ascension to Heaven.\u00a0 In Christian narrative this story is referred to as Christ\u2019s \u201cHarrowing of Hell,\u201d the nearest analogue in Christian mythopoeic literature of the transformative hero journey of subterranean descent-ascent as a form of initiatory death-rebirth.\u00a0 When Jesus miraculously ascends from the underworld depths of Hell, the realm of the dead\u2014Jung\u2019s \u201cland of ghosts\u201d\u2014he is no longer Jesus, the man, but Christ, the resurrected semi-deity (Boyer, 2014c; Boyer, 2017b), a narrative trajectory closely imitated more than a millennia later by the mythic poet and literary hero, Dante.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text disabled_on=”on|on|off” module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_enable_color=”off” custom_padding=”4px|4px|4px|4px|true|true” border_radii=”on|6px|6px|6px|6px” border_width_all=”2px” border_color_all=”#62472a”]<\/p>\n Dante\u2019s wedding of the myth-motifs of the hero quest in the depths of forests with Jung\u2019s night sea journey and the analogous myth-motif of subterranean descent into Hades\u2014\u201cthe land of ghosts \u2026 beyond this world\u201d\u2014is a rare example in literary mythology that forcefully illustrates the nearly identical motifs of Campbell\u2019s heroic wilderness landscape and Jung\u2019s thesis of symbolic identity between the myth-motifs of descent into the depths of a dark watery abyss and the descent into the subterranean underworld (i.e., Hades or Hell).<\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Concluding Discussion ” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the realm of world mythology and mythopoeic literature, Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> occupies a special position in its unique artistic and literary portrayal of the mythic hero\u2019s journey of descent.\u00a0 With the exception of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s epic literary trilogy, Lord of the Rings<\/em>, perhaps no hero journey\u2019s mythopoeic landscape compares in scope to Dante\u2019s nekyia<\/em>, imagined as an epic mythic journey of descent into Jung\u2019s collective unconscious that utilizes three major archetypal routes into the underworld depths\u2014by forest, night-sea, and subterranean descent\u2014and whose entire adventure takes place in the setting of an underworld described in breathtaking scope and exhaustive detail.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, the mythic hero quest journey remains incomplete if only the journey of descent or death is described, an important limitation in a study of brief scope as presented in these pages.\u00a0 As the transformative journey of Jesus Christ in the Harrowing of Hell suggests, the descent into the underworld is merely a prelude to the story\u2019s important conclusion.\u00a0 The journey of descent sets the stage for the subsequent journey of ascent <\/em>and return<\/em> to the upper world, the semi-divine hero now transformed, regenerated, and resurrected (i.e., reborn) from death.\u00a0 In Virgil\u2019s Aeneid <\/em>(n.d.\/2006), the Sibyl of Cumae warns the hero Aeneas that the \u201cdescent to the Underworld is easy.\/Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,\/But to retrace your steps, to climb back up to the upper air\u2014\/There the struggle, there the labor lies\u201d (p. 186).<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed it is this difficult journey of return (Campbell, 1949\/1973, pp. 193-244) to the upper light\u2014the inverse of the descent in which the triumphant hero returns through a journey of ascent to the light of the ordinary but newly transformed world\u2014that makes the essential symbolic point of the tale.\u00a0 The point is not the hero\u2019s death, but the transformation<\/em> symbolized as the hero\u2019s death (in its myriad forms) followed by renewed or regenerated life (i.e., Jung\u2019s individuation process). The journey of Dante\u2019s descent explored in this study is only the first part of this narrative trajectory or story arc\u2014the tale of the hero\u2019s death or symbolic encounter with Death in the realm of the dead.\u00a0 The return trip, Dante\u2019s journey of ascent or return, begins at the conclusion of Inferno<\/em>, when the pilgrims, after encountering Satan himself, enter \u201cthat secluded passage\/That would lead us back to the lit world\u201d (Bang, 2013, 330).\u00a0 Their initial journey of ascent is extremely efficient, as Dante and Virgil climb out through a round opening to \u201conce again catch sight of the stars\u201d (p. 330).\u00a0 But this return merely marks the beginning of Dante\u2019s epic journey of ascent, a journey described in unparalleled detail and scope in The<\/em> Purgatorio<\/em> and Paradiso <\/em>that complete his remarkable tale.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the ancient myth of the goddess Inanna, one of the earliest deities whose nekyia<\/em> or mythic journey of descent, based on oral storytelling tradition, was recorded in textual form, the complete cycle of Campbell\u2019s (1949\/1973) \u201cdowngoing and upcoming\u201d is described when the goddess\u2019s father, the great god Enki, teaches Inanna about the cyclical form her journey must take.\u00a0 Her journey is concisely described in the myth: \u201cDescent into the underworld! Ascent from the underworld!\u201d (Wolkstein & Kramer, p. 15). This journey, like the path trodden by Virgil\u2019s hero Aeneas, and by Dante more than two millennia later, is a journey of transformation\u2014suffering, death, and transfiguration\u2014as psychologically relevant today as when the primordial myths of indigenous societies throughout the world were originally told.\u00a0 This archetypal journey of descent and ascent\u2014as Jung, Campbell, Mircea Eliade (1958) and scores of Jungian scholars indicate (Boyer, 2011; 2014b; 2017a; 2017b)\u2014can be interpreted as a literary expression of the presumably universal initiatory ordeal of symbolic death and rebirth told in countless local variations in the metaphorical language of psyche\u2014a mythopoeic grammar of psychological individuation and authentic human identity and wholeness expressed in ever-recurring metaphors and symbols from which mythopoeic narratives like Dante\u2019s Inferno,<\/em> and indeed the entire Divine Comedy<\/em>, are constructed.\u00a0<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Conclusion” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]Dante\u2019s Inferno <\/em>illustrates, in late medieval mythopoeic literature, Jung\u2019s theory of the archetypal nekyia<\/em> journey of heroic descent into the depths as represented in the topographical imagery of the analogous motifs of nekyia<\/em> as night-sea journey and nekyia<\/em> as subterranean descent or descensus ad inferos.\u00a0 <\/em>Jung\u2019s views are amplified by Campbell\u2019s analogue of the hero quest into the depths of a primitive forest.\u00a0 The comprehensive scope of Dante\u2019s narrative journey into the depths\u2014pictured in these perennial, archetypal, metaphorical forms and topographical \u201cpsychic\u201d landscapes\u2014is perhaps unrivaled in world literature and mythology, with the possible exception of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/em>.\u00a0 Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> is a rare example of an entire detailed narrative taking place in a mythical underworld that is explicitly described as the Land of the Dead.\u00a0 <\/strong>Part 2 of this study will examine the archetypal trajectory of return or ascent to the upper air (the world of light) in Dante\u2019s epic trilogy, completing the archetypal structural narrative arc of this story, as it has in countless other mythopoetic tales across the world since beginning-less time.<\/p>\n This paper represents the continuation of the early amplification and interpretation of archetypal material in Dante\u2019s mythopoeic literary masterpiece, exemplified by Jungian scholar Helen Luke\u2019s (1989) wonderful interpretation in From Dark Wood to White Rose<\/em> (1989).\u00a0 This interpretive excavation of Dante\u2019s Comedy<\/em> from the perspective of Jungian psychological criticism, suggested by Jung himself in his early career comments on Dante,[7]<\/sup><\/a> has only recently begun.\u00a0 More comprehensive interpretations of Dante\u2019s archetypal imagery along these lines seem worthy of more than one graduate thesis or doctoral dissertation.[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”References” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2020-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/paper-texture.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” collapsed=”on”][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ header_2_font=”Eczar||||||||”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″][et_pb_text module_class=”reference” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false”]<\/p>\n Alighieri, D. (n.d.\/1970). The divine comedy: The inferno, the purgatorio, and the paradiso<\/em> (J. Ciardi, Trans.). New York, NY: New American Library.<\/p>\n Alighieri, D. (n.d.\/2012). Dante Alighieri:<\/em> Inferno<\/em> (M.J. Bang, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.<\/p>\n Baum, L.F. (1900). The wonderful wizard of Oz<\/em> (1st<\/sup> ed.). New York, NY: George M. Hill.<\/p>\n Bedier, J. (1945). The romance of Tristan and Iseult<\/em> (H. Belloc, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon.<\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2011). Key archetypes in the Celtic myth of Tristan and Isolde: A brief introduction. <\/em>Retrieved at\u00a0https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/622341\/Key_Archetypes_in_the_Celtic_Myth_of_Tristan_and_Isolde_A_Brief_Introduction<\/a><\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2012, August). Introduction to the mythic orphan: Archetypal origins of the hero in myth, literature and film.<\/em> Paper presented at the Symposium for the Study of Myth, Santa Barbara, CA.<\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2014a). The other world of Oz: The threshold passage of Dorothy Gale. In Coreopsis: Journal of Myth & Theater, 3<\/em>(2), Spring\/Summer 2014. Retrieved at https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/7574495\/Entering_the_Other_World_of_Oz_The_Threshold_Passage_of_Dorothy_Gale<\/a><\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2014b, June). To die, and be reborn: The death-rebirth motif in myth & rite, literature & film.<\/em> Paper presented at the International Conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS), Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ.<\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2014c, November). The Gospel as transformative myth: Individuation imagery in DeMille\u2019s King of Kings<\/em>. Unpublished manuscript, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.<\/p>\n Boyer, R.L. (2017a). The rebirth archetype in fairy tales: A study of Fitcher\u2019s Bird<\/em> andLittle Red Cap<\/em>. Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theatre<\/em>, 6<\/em>(1), Spring 2017). Retrieved at\u00a0http:\/\/www.societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/spring-2017-issue\/the-rebirth-archetype-in-fairy-tales\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n
Mythopoetics and Jungian Archetypal Theory <\/h2>\n
Depth Imagery in Dante\u2019s Journey of Descent
\n<\/h2>\nFindings and Discussion<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Concluding Discussion <\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n