How seriously can we take stories about trips to the underworld? Perhaps they’re just old stories; but there is a way of thinking about them that brings out something important.
It starts with the idea of a purely psychic form of existence. According to Hillman,1James Hillman, The Dream & the Underworld. we’ve got at least a metaphorical image for that: the underworld (Hades). We can read mythical narratives to refer to a form of being rather than a literal place: thus Hades is not a location somewhere (“under” the world), and it is not literal death of a person which brings their shadow (image) there — rather, when we learn to disregard the concerns of the external world and focus on spirit and soul (when we metaphorically “die to the world”), we gain the ability to view everything we experience from a different point of view (that of the metaphorical underworld).
Now if we were to look at things this way — how far can we go with it? We might simply take such dying to the world in the sense of a phase, something transitory that happens at particular points in life. This is how Stein treats the idea of Hades: as one leg of the journey he lays out for the midlife transition: “At the crux of midlife liminality is the experience that is imagined, dreamt, and felt as existing in a land of the dead”.2Murray Stein, In Midlife, 108.
Or one can go further. Jung himself had done so, and that’s what he refers to at the beginning of his autobiography when he reflects on what, from his life experience, he wanted to include:
I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions. […] All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings. […] Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the “other” reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. […] when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 14-16.
Perhaps it is not very surprising that Jung (given his life’s work as a psychologist) would put some emphasis on the “inner” world. But his statement says much more than that: what Jung outlines here is a way of living, a form of existence. And the dead giveaway is the quite revealing remark that “in that realm there has always been wealth in abundance”. For that, of course one, is of the prime characteristics always assigned to Hades — so much so that no soul ever wants to return from his realm because of it.3Viz. Plato, Crat 403a-404b.
During times when one moves into the depths of the inner world, one disengages proportionally from the external world. Or, expressed in the stark mythical imagery that Hillman has proposed, when one descends into the underworld, one leaves the world of the living (and one’s own life in that upper world) behind. The nekyia is always a journey away from something — social reality, envisioned futures, physical liveliness — as well as towards something else. It is a directed path; but that means not so much directed “towards a goal” — rather, it means a consistent increase of inner depth and decrease of import from the external.
Consider this analogy. Suppose you go for a hike in the mountains. You start out in a town at the foot of the hills, in the middle of busy social and commercial activity; you move upwards through the outskirts of town, along developed roads, but at some point it becomes footpaths and villages, and even higher up, just the occasional wooden hut. Lush vegetation gives way to sparse vegetation. Rich soundscapes of birdsong and barking dogs (to say nothing of the noises from human activities) get replaced by silences only backgrounded with the wailing wind. So this path you’re taking, in one sense, has a clear directedness: it gradually reduces the relative amount of life (social life, human life, animal and even plant life) you encounter, and proportionally increases the intensity, purity, and loneliness of nature itself. (And that experience, of course, is what we seek when we go on this kind of hike.) But note that there is no need to assume a specific destination: you don’t have to try and arrive at the peak of the mountain, or indeed any particular location. The hike — including its directedness — is still the same if you just “go up there for a day”. Similarly with the descent into the underworld. We mustn’t confuse the directedness of the nekyia with the notion that it must have a particular goal or outcome.
But we can meaningfully ask whether any journey downwards must be matched or compensated, sooner or later, with a corresponding move upwards. Must there be, for any descent to the underworld, a compensating return trip, back to the fold of social life? (And if so, why would that be?) The occidental tradition frequently sets it up this way (just think of Plato’s cave in the Politeia or Dante’s Inferno/Paradiso layout; although there is also at least one major mythical form, namely that of Orpheus, which presents the return trip it as (still desired but) failing. In contrast, the answers from within the Jungian tradition seem to be surprisingly varied.
Hillman on the return from the underworld
1. When looking at Hillman, we first have to make a distinction: in the earlier books, Hillman seems to explore the idea that we might move deeper and deeper into the psychological (which is what the nekyia metaphorically expresses), and that this movement results in producing more soul (soul-making, in the famous expression Hillman has coined for it), which has otherwise been in decline or retreat over recent centuries. In his later work, however, he seems to explicitly take it all back, and re-asserts the claims of the external world, especially the social and institutional forms, which he now sees as what actually embodies soul (reflected by an externalized anima mundi). To the degree the earlier work was original and fascinating (perhaps even inspiring), this must be appear as a failure of nerve, a disappointing fallback towards the default position.
But note that what is behind the later Hillman’s views is not so much the notion that there must necessarily be a return path, coming back from the descent. Rather, he seems less interested in the path towards the depth in the first place (having converted to the position that soul resides in social institutions and life patterns in the external world). There is no need for either leg of the journey. And thus the later Hillman’s position is really more an opt-out of the question as a whole.
The earlier Hillman, on the other hand, has much to say about the journey downwards, and rather little (as far as I can make out) about the converse move. If that converse, i.e. upwards move appears at all, it would be in the critical stance he takes towards attempts to utilize any voyage towards the depths for daytime concerns.
Consider this statement, at the very beginning of The Dream and the Underworld:
Freud […] called the dream a royal road, the via regia to the unconscious. But because this via regia, in most psychotherapy since his time, has become a straight one-way street of all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious toward the ego’s city, I have chosen to face the other way. (DU 1)
What Hillman criticizes here is the default attitude (or assumption) of his time towards dreams: that their job is to give us some insight or direction helping us in our daily lives, with our practical concerns, relationship conflicts, career goals, and the like. And we can easily verify that this is still very widespread today, if not in professional analysis, then at least in popular self-help literature. Just grab a few books (or watch some Youtube videos) on lucid dreaming, dream yoga, shamanic dreaming or the like, and scan the introduction for their selling points: what does the author promise as a result of your reading and applying those practices? In most cases, it will be something like “harness the power of dreams / the unconscious to create more wealth / happiness / better relationships / … for you” — and this doesn’t mean “dream wealth” or “dream companionship”, of course: it means wealth or relationships in the day world. Dreams are there, according to the popular view, to assist us in our waking life.
Yet to say that he has “chosen to face the other way” might only mean that Hillman, for the purposes of his argument, takes the other direction — as a kind of counterbalancing move, so to speak. Emphasizing the movement towards depth, into the underworld experience, might have become necessary as counterweight, as a requirement of the times; but this doesn’t imply that the other direction thus becomes unnecessary. It’s just de-emphasized.
There are, however, several passages in The Dream and the Underworld which appear to push in the opposite direction (DU 40f., 42f., 48, 63; I’m also reading 68-74 to be in that vein). One image he repeatedly uses is that of a bridge (between the dayworld and the underworld), and he intends to break down, even “burn down” the bridges which lead (one-way) in the conventional direction (cf. DU 13, 195). The final section of the book, although it has some programmatic vagueness to it, also articulates an attitude that seems to imply that the move into psychological depth should waive all provisions for a return ticket. And the path towards soul is frequently made out to have no bottom, to go deeper ad infinitum (DU 25, 31) ending somewhere radically disconnected and inaccessible from the living world (DU 38, 48).
Thus I think we can, with some justification, read a position out of Hillman’s early work where he proposes that the notion a return leg from the journey into the underworld is not just de facto over-emphasized in the thinking of his time, but actually misconceived and wrong. (Given, to say it again, that the “return leg” is understood here in terms of harnessing dream contents to assist with day world concerns.)
2. There is one very important qualification to this critical stance, however, and Hillman never fails to bring up that qualification when he makes the critical point (e.g. at DU 13, 31). The qualification is that “waking life” is understood, in the default attitude which he criticizes, as practical, literal, natural (in the sense of “natural” where nature is disenchanted and devoid of soul). Only when “waking life” is taken that way the view that dreams must serve it becomes problematic.
Although at first glance this qualification looks as if it is meant to make the radicalism more palatable, I think that this is not Hillman’s primary motivation for making it. (When examined more closely, it is also doubtful whether it really does much to make his views look less radical.) Rather, what happens here is that Hillman tries to integrate the various strands that make up the fabric of his position. Having just developed the notion that dreams (and the underworld) must be understood on their own terms and not just as an instrument for practical purposes, he connects that with another of his central notions: namely, that the psychological must always be understood as irreducibly metaphorical. (Or, to put it in a different way: that once you narrow an understanding or motivation for action down to a single interpretation, insist on the primacy of the literal, etc., you have no longer one foot in the day world and one foot in the night world, but have entirely excluded the night world, myth, metaphor etc. from your inner life: you have effectively de-souled, de-animated, or de-psychologized it.)
The connection between these two notions is of course much more complicated than Hillman alludes to in those passages. The point of bringing the latter notion up here only serves the purpose of keeping it in mind, so to speak. In general, Hillman rarely spends many pages integrating his various ideas: mostly, he develops and fleshes out a single one, while sporadically bringing up one or the other from the rest. In this sense, he is a remarkably focused writer. But since he doesn’t give any explicit pointers, he leaves it to the reader to orientate themselves in the various lines of thought he lays out — to figure out which of his remarks is meant as a deepening of the notion currently under discussion, and which is a reminder of the pull from some other notion instead. (This stylistic remark, just as my thesis above with respect to his radicalism, applies more to the early writings than to the later ones.)
Are the descent to the underworld and the night sea journey the same thing?
Before we can finish our discussion of Hillman’s position, with respect to the guiding question (whether a descent to the underworld requires a compensating return trip — and if so, why), we must first become clear about a certain difficulty with this question itself within the Jungian tradition.
The difficulty is that in the older strata of the tradition the style of exploring the question seems to be driven more by a collector’s mentality than by analytical investigation: Jung (in Psychology & Alchemy, for example, or in Symbols of Transformation) or Campbell (in The Hero with a Thousand Faces) tend to heap up examples from mediaeval writings or retellings of ancient myths, all of them mutually connected by similarities, and all of them arguably to do with the motive of venturing into the depths — but then they generally leave it at that. In his Preface to the 1949 edition, Campbell makes this explicitly his chosen method: “It is the purpose of this book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself.” (xii; my emphasis).4This idea, that it would be enough to just quote the examples and it would be “apparent” or “obvious” seems to have been one of Jung’s, too. He frequently bitterly complains about his critics, who seem to have been unable to see what he saw (as “obvious”). Jung then usually blamed his critics’ “prejudice”, rather than drawing the conclusion that perhaps a heap of examples might not be enough, and some more explication might be necessary. The choice of words should give us pause here: what does it mean to speak of “not-too-difficult” examples? Campbell must have been aware of rather a number of “figures from religion and mythology” which present difficult cases, i.e. cases where some interpretation work (and perhaps debate) was required.
Although this procedure of “amplification” may have its uses in a concrete (therapeutic) analysis, it leaves a sense of arbitrariness and, more importantly, superficiality (rather than depth) when we investigate specific theoretical questions. Consequently, the important work of sorting out the relevant mythical motives from the unrelated (more removed ones) has taken up some space in the critical approaches of later writers (such as Hillman in The Dream and the Underworld) or writers who follow up a specific mythical narrative more in-depth, i.e., more psychologically in the proper sense (such as Stein does with the underworld endeavor of the Odyssey in In Midlife).
We will have to re-trace some of that critical work and then apply it back to Jung’s and Campbell’s older discussions in order to gain a deeper understanding of their views.
1. Following Hillman, we can start by distinguishing two clusters of myths which the older tradition frequently conflates: the nekyia, or journey to the underworld (in which we’re interested here, to the point of taking it to symbolize an entire way of living) vs. the hero’s Nachtmeerfahrt: the hike inside the belly of the whale. Hillman deploys some effort (though not always clearly distinguished from other themes which he mixes in) sorting these apart; Stein, by virtue of focusing on the Odysseus story, can avoid collusions from the hero’s journey cluster altogether and thus be much more insightful about the nekyia.
In Jung, on the other hand, the two clusters generally simply get assimilated. Take, for example, this passage from Symbols of Transformation:
[Um] sich eine neue oder ewige Jugend [zu erkämpfen] muß man aber, allen Gefahren trotzend, meistens in den Leib des Ungeheuers hinabsteigen (“Höllenfahrt”) und dort unten einige Zeit verweilen (“Nachtmeerfahrt”). (GW V, §374)
We can see here that for Jung, the motif of descent into the underworld and the motif of spending time in the belly of the beast (whale or dragon) are basically just variations in the imagery, but they all point to the same underlying psychodynamics: namely, a voluntary self-dissolution of the conscious ego and a ceding of control to the unconscious. The latter is represented by the depths (the underworld, ocean, …) and the beasts (dragon, whale, …) alike, and the mass of mythological examples that fill the pages of Symbols are intended to persuade us that these are just so many variations of the same theme. In other words: for Jung, we’re talking about the same thing — whether we present it narratively as descent into hell or as getting swallowed by the whale. The differences in the images are insubstantial, they do not refer to different psychodynamics.
But this creates a problem when we now consider that the dragon (snake, whale, …) is also supposed to signify the Great Mother, particularly her monstrous aspect. (The struggle against the Great Mother is, after all, the overarching theme in the hero myth, and thus one of the foundational premises in Symbols. It is also in the title of the very chapter from which I’ve just quoted: “Symbole der Mutter und der Wiedergeburt”.)
The problem is a common one with any associative style of thought. Everything is based on similarity, and similarity is rarely validly transitive. From “A resembles B” and “B resembles C” it doesn’t generally follow that “A resembles C”, and even though the imagery of descent (the nekyia motive) and the imagery of the belly of the beast (the Nachtmeerfahrt) might both help us picture the self-dissolution dynamic of consciousness and temporary ceding of control to unconscious forces, it’s only the latter motif and not the former that brings forward any useful symbolism to work through the mother complex. (The later conflation of the underworld with “mother Earth” that Hillman criticizes in DU 35-43, 68-74 hadn’t happened yet at the time of writing of Symbols.) But the latter is the psychological issue at hand, and perhaps Jung should have been more discriminating and stuck to those motifs which clearly speak to that issue, rather than be over-inclusive and collect basically everything which shows a mere superficial resemblance.
(Although this is perhaps a little too unfair a criticism, given the pioneering nature of Jung’s early work; yet we must also consider that he claimed progressively more dominance for this “method” of amplification: whereas in the early work he cautioned that the amplifying material would always have to be checked against the analysand’s response, in his later phases he dropped such methodological checks and balances and indulged, even in his broader psychological writings, in what I have above called a collector’s mentality — with the result that those writings overflow with endless museum exhibitions of mythical imagery and frequently lose any thread of thought in the process.)
2. While in Symbols Jung could have dropped, without any loss, all references to the underworld and confined himself to the Nachtmeerfahrt cluster, things are not so clear any more in the later Psychology & Alchemy. The main premise behind his thought there is no longer the hero’s journey and the struggle against the overpowering mother, but the archetypally delineated path of the individuation process (with the Shadow, Anima, Wise Old Man now featuring prominently in the cast of characters). Jung tries to trace this process through an extensive dream series and collects the symbolism that can be found there (or can be read into it), and then interprets the alchemistic opus as referring to that same dynamics, mostly by pointing out similar imagery (see GW XII §§39, 40 for a programmatic statement).
When it comes to the descent into the underworld, the narrative is generally one of bringing new life to a barren realm which, however, already carries the potential of such new life (but unconsciously). In Psychology & Alchemy the source is a story from the Visio Arislei about the sea king.5GW XII, §§ 435-441; there is an interpretation of a different alchemistic text along the same lines in Mysterium Coniunctionis: GW XIV/I, §§ 183-205.
Insofern der König “exanimis”, das heißt entseelt, oder sein Land unfruchtbar ist, will das soviel heißen, als daß der verborgene Zustand ein solcher der Latenz und Potentialität ist. Das Dunkel und die Meerestiefe wollen nichts anderes bedeuten als den unbewußten Zustand eines Inhaltes […]. (GW XII, § 436)
The narrative is thus about a transformative psychodynamic, where unconscious potential is brought back into life — a process resembling therapy, personal growth out of an unproductive phase, or the like. Consequently, the motifs of death and rebirth, and the descent into the unconscious with the purpose of retrieval what is sunken there, are dominant in Jung’s amplification: “Der Todesfall ist […] der vollzogene Abstieg des Geistes in die Materie” (ibd.); “die Notwendigkeit des Abstieges in die dunkle Welt des Unbewußten […], [die Handlung] deren Ziel und Ende die Wiederherstellung des Lebens, die Auferstehung und Todüberwindung ist” (ibd.). Such stark imagery for this psychic transformation is apt, since the process is dangerous to the point of self-destruction:
Jene Scheu und jener Widerstand, die jeder natürliche Mensch gegen ein zu tiefes Versinken in sich selbst empfindet, sind im Grunde genommen die Angst vor der Hadesfahrt. […] vom seelischen Hintergrund, eben von jenem dunkeln, unbekannten Raum, [geht] eine faszinierende Anziehung aus, welche um so überwältigender zu werden droht, je weiter man eindringt. Die psychologische Gefahr, die dabei eintritt, ist eine Auflösung der Persönlichkeit […] (Ibd., §439)
What is missing, however, are the elements of adventure and confrontation of the mother complex from the hero myth, and therefore, strictly speaking, this appears to be a different dynamic than the one Jung looked at in Symbols. But that wasn’t his view: on the contrary, he explicitly links the dynamic he amplifies here with the hero myth (not least in the section title of the passage that starts at §437), and cross-references his discussion from Symbols. He also casually weaves several of the images from the Nachtmeerfahrt, and even the term itself, into his amplification of the alchemical story (see, for instance, §§ 436, 440). So it seems that for Jung, even in this later period, the alchemistical process of descent into the unconscious and transformation of unconscious contents into a larger Self (i.e., the individuation process) and the hero myth do seem to coincide — the nekyia and the Nachtmeerfahrt are still more or less expressions of the same process. (This impression is reinforced when we consider his selection of illustrations in these passages in Psychology & Alchemy, in addition to just the choice of words; viz. ill. 170-176 in particular.)
Hillman on the return from the underworld (contd.)
3. Having tracked how Jung amalgamates the nekyia and the Nachtmeerfahrt, we are now in a better position to continue and understand the distinctions Hillman wants to make.
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea-journey of the hero in many ways. […] the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea-journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. (DU 168)
On the face of it, this is a surprising statement, since in the various passages of The Dream and the Underworld where he mentions mythological descents and refers to them as nekyia, his distinction doesn’t apply: Aeneas and Ulysses go down there to “learn from the underworld which re-visions their life in the upperworld”, as he insists twice (85, 113), and Hercules goes there on a mission, too (ibd.; that mission is of course to capture Kerberos, the hell-hound). Hillman furthermore lists Orpheus, Dionysus, and Christ (85) as well as Dante (20), Ishtar and Enkidu (46), and various others’ descents; finally, he also points out that, closer to our time, “Freud’s underworld experience, like Jung’s own descent later, was the touchstone for an entire life” (21). Although references to the night sea journey are hard to find in the book, references to the nekyia are plenty, and without fail those are all examples where there is a return — and one with consequences for the upper world life that follows it. So if there is a distinction and a pattern here in these clusters of motifs, then Hillman (in the quote above) has it exactly wrong.
Yet if we bracket Hillman’s own references to antiquity and follow the line of thought in the book on its own merit (rather than trying to “demonstrate” or “amplify” it with heaps of quotations), a sense does emerge in which his distinction makes perfect sense. The basic idea is that underworld talk is metaphorical and indicates becoming more psychological or (in Hillmanian parlance) the activity of “psychologizing” which is a component of soul-making — and that this is, as it were, itself a sufficient goal (or as ancient eudaimonistic philosophy would have it, a telos): an end in itself rather than an instrument for some different or further end (personal growth, say, or development towards a comprehensive Jungian Self; let alone external ends such as fame, wealth, or power). Seen from this underlying perspective, we can easily see the point of a distinction between descent as gradual deepening without a particular end target (where more of the “deepening” is the only characteristic that makes it a descent) vs. descent as temporary stay in “another region”, which has the point of not merely visiting, but getting back something from the entire process as well.
I think that is the distinction Hillman has in mind in the quote above. He labels the two options nekyia and night sea journey, respectively, presumably because a) the night sea journey is already clearly associated with the hero myth and “bringing back the treasure” (we have already seen that Jung generally makes this connection); and b) the nekyia reference is more directly associated with underworld mythology specifically (which some of the night sea journey, viz. the “belly of the whale” motif, is not necessarily). He just seems to have lost sight a little of the many passages beforehand in the book where he used “nekyia” in its different, wider sense himself (a sense in which his distinction loses its grip).
I want to insist here that the distinction we’re touching upon is more fundamental than just one of association with one mythical cluster or the other. Or to put it differently: we’re not simply sorting descent narratives into those which are connected with the hero myth and those which aren’t. This may have been Hillman’s immediate motivation (distance his ideas from a generalized hero myth, such as the “monomyth” found in Campbell’s thinking; resist the dominance of the hero story, and its association with the mother complex, which he diagnosed in the Zeitgeist of his own times and criticized, not least in the early passages of The Dream and the Underworld). But the difference goes deeper, and a more reliable indicator than whether the context resembles a hero narrative is whether the story is one of descent because that’s an instrument needed for further purposes (because something “must be brought back”). For as soon as that is the case (whether there is resisting the Great Mother or not), we’re in the structure of the Nachtmeerfahrt, and no longer at soul-making for the sake of making soul — which, if it is done, is done for that sake alone.
Campbell on the return from the underworld
Joseph Campbell dedicates a whole chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces to “The Return” — so he has to say quite a bit about the return leg of the journey there.
1. In Campbell’s universe, living beings undergo transformation all the time, and all transformation follows the same general pattern. That pattern, universal as it is, has traditionally been expressed in countless variations: such variations of the narrative are what we call “myths”, and the underlying general pattern that can be found in them is what Campbell dubs the “monomyth”. (That single, underlying mythical pattern is the Hero’s journey, and those variations are what the “thousand faces” refer to in the title of the book.)
So when Campbell talks about “The Return” (167-209), what he has in mind is not necessarily a return path from the underworld, understood as a purely psychic realm, in the way I have posed the question. Instead, Campbell’s return leg is the return from the Hero’s journey, and although the latter might be a journey into the underworld (the “Belly of the Whale”, as Campbell’s label goes), it could also be an altogether different kind of journey, as long as it is broadly a journey of transformation. Any form of venture into the unknown would fit the bill — as long as it is part of a transformative process, the Hero’s journey can symbolize it.
Campbell is in agreement here with Jung, whom we have seen to generally assimilate the nekyia with the night sea journey. There are differences, however, between Jung’s and Campbell’s accounts: for one thing, although Jung (in Symbols) does simply throw the underworld imagery in with the hero myth, he does not treat that latter myth as fundamentally the root pattern of all myth, thus allowing different mythical complexes where the same (underworld) imagery might play a different role. Consequently, as we also have seen, the place of the hero myth is re-evaluated against the various alchemical clusters he traces in later works.
A second, more important difference will come out when we look at what Campbell has to say about the return leg of the journey. According to him, there is a range of possibilities.
2. First of all, the hero may simply refuse to return:
For if he has won through, like the Buddha, to the profound repose of complete enlightenment, there is danger that the bliss of this experience may annihilate all recollection of, interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world; or else the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve.
Joseph Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces, 29.
If Campbell makes this option sound like a kind of failure, that is not an accident. It seems very much as if the hero should come back, as if there was some kind of obligation — and as if only forgetfulness or timidness might motivate someone to shirk that responsibility. Even the Buddha’s enlightenment is counted rather as an excuse here: its bliss “annihilates recollection” of the sorrows of the world, which recollection (if it wasn’t destroyed) would surely bring the hero back to the path, and thus to attempt a return.
Campbell simply seems to assume that the fact of “economic problems” in the world has to compel someone who has managed to climb a spiritual path to then come back and resolve them. But this (once we make it explicit) seems rather confused — as if the purpose of the spiritual path was to make the world materially better. Where does this requirement come from?
Well, for Campbell that is basically a starting point:
The return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat (ibd.)
So it is the collective’s requirement: societies or communities only allow the spiritual path as a kind of deal — “we” allow you to be a hero and develop (or adventure) somewhere apart from “us”, in return for which “you” have to come back and serve us with the fruits of that adventure.
Therefore in Campbell’s account, the option to refuse the return, although it might in fact happen, is a form of moral failure, a violation of a responsibility.
3. We can see now where the second difference lies between Jung’s and Campbell’s views. In Jung, although the hero myth generally continues though the underworld and back upwards (carrying the “treasure”), failure to do so is not a violation of responsibility against the collective, but rather a danger for the hero: getting stuck in the underworld (or the “belly of the whale”) is tantamount to saying, psychologically, that a person who has deliberately given conscious control away is now caught in unconscious patterns (viz. psychosis, depression) and unable to return. This is not so much a loss for the collective, but rather amounts to the destruction of the individual soul altogether. (It is here that Jung typically cites the “perils of the soul” as a fitting slogan for what is going on; cf. GW XII §§ 437-439.) In Jung, other than in Campbell, the hero’s journey doesn’t run for the sake of the collective (and not for the conscious ego’s purposes, either): it runs for the sake of soul. Even where the structure suggests a return stage, failing to make that leg of the journey does not imply an irresponsibility towards society, but rather a failure as an individual. (Which even allows for a variant, one that is in a blind spot for Campbell’s account, where the failure of the hero consists in their very conformity with collective purposes. This would be what Jung calls a regressive restoration of the Persona; viz. GW VII, § 254).
4. Societies are not immune to the same charge of breaking Campbell’s implicit deal, however:
if the hero […] makes his safe and willing return, he may meet with such a blank misunderstanding and disregard from those whom he has come to help that his career will collapse. (Ibd.)
In this case, the failure is not on the side of the hero (who, we might say, at least tries), but on the side of the collective which, for some reason, is not receptive.
Add to this the cases where the hero does go on the return trip, but stumbles (like Orpheus), and we have now already seen three kinds of failure. Nonetheless, as Campbell points out (178), the very fact that a return is attempted (even if it fails) shows that there is a possibility; the general pattern of the hero’s journey (Campbell’s “monomyth”) certainly contains that option.
(There is a fourth variant which Campbell discusses: that where the return is effected, or at least supported, from without — in the form of a deus ex machina, or else the community simply “getting the hero back”. This, although technically a success, seems too easy, and is therefore counted among the weaker versions.)
5. From all this it seems to me that Campbell certainly saw the return from the underworld as an essential part of his fundamental story. Such a return might fail in various ways, but even so (as mere attempt or as failure) it is required. A hero who ventures into the unknown must come back, in one way or another, to complete the tale.
More importantly, again, we can see why that is. Although the mythical story may be told in a way that is centered around the hero, the very motivation (or, as Campbell says, the “justification”) has to do with the collective. It is society which requires heroes to venture out and (at least occasionally) come back. The larger context, then, is centered around the needs of the collective; now if, as Campbell thinks, all myths are fundamentally the same and all myths are likewise owned by the collective, then any trip to the underworld therefore carries an obligation for the hero to then come back and provide the treasure he found there into the world that sent him out in the first place. The necessity of the return leg, thus, is built into Campbell’s very philosophy.
