Theory of the Underworld
Ecology imagines a giant living system, the biosphere, where nothing that once existed is ever lost. There is no void and death is always in service of life in the giant flows of metabolic flux; everything folds into everything else. Why should we not assume then that, just as the stuff of the body is returned and recycled into the earth, so too is the stuff of the mind? The speculative realm to which the mind returns has been known to us from time immemorial, found variously across diverse traditions: the bardo realm, hades, sheol, the land of the dead, the spirit realm, the underworld, and, most vividly in the recent explorations of psychedelia, DMT space. The “golden bough,” by which Aeneas gains entrance to the underworld, is clearly a tryptamine; plant wisdom can guide us into the furthest reaches of psyche and spirit, even prior to death. The “space” of this underworld can be defined as non-human, non-organic, subterranean and not-particularly-nice; the very bottom of natura naturans—what lies dreaming in rocks; a way-station of all psyche, a pool where every consciousness returns and from which all consciousness is born. It is a magic realm that pervades the real at every point; the very real of consciousness. As Freud argues in The Theme of the Three Caskets (1913), the immutable law of death and the circuitous pathways of eros are one and the same. The navel of Freud’s dream, the deepest regions of psyche, resides in our mother the earth, to which we are all returning.
The Golden Bough, 1834, JMW Turner
