Modern life trains us to seek progress and clarity, yet the psyche evolves through descent. Myth offers a different lens, one where uncertainty, loss, and change are not errors in the system but essential stages of transformation. When we live symbolically, even darkness becomes a source of wisdom.
The Wisdom of Darkness
When life breaks apart, when plans collapse, love changes form, or the future dissolves into uncertainty, we often say we’ve entered a “dark night.”
But in the symbolic language of the soul, darkness isn’t a punishment. It is a passage, and an important one.
To live through the eyes of myth is to recognize that every moment of rupture —those sudden changes of fate that feel like uncontrollable karma —carries an important architecture of transformation. Myth gives us a lens through which to perceive that what feels chaotic is also part of a grand pattern that rules our reality, and that what feels senseless may be secretly ordained by meaning.
The Descent as a Universal Story
Every culture has told the story of descent: Inanna entering the underworld, Orpheus following Eurydice, Persephone drawn below to meet the hidden god. These myths echo a truth embedded in the psyche itself: to become whole, one must pass through what was once feared.
Modern life, however, trains us to escape the underworld. We are taught to optimize, fix, and ascend, becoming the hero and saving the day! But psyche (ancient Greek word for soul) doesn’t evolve through efficiency. It evolves through encounter.
When we enter symbolic darkness — a period of confusion, heartbreak, or transformation — the soul seeks what the ego cannot: depth.
Meaning isn’t lost there; it is re-forged. The myth of descent reminds us that the dark is not an obstacle to consciousness but its cradle.
Love as an Alchemical Force
In mythic terms, love is rarely a gentle force. It is an agent of change. Eros, in its truest sense, doesn’t arrive to comfort us but to dismantle the parts of us that resist becoming real. In this sense, love infuses us with the courage to pursue the unthinkable, what the mind deems unreasonable. Love unfuses the soul with lifeforce to erupt dormant layers of the self.
Every genuine encounter with love — human, creative, or divine — acts like a fissure of light through our psychic armor. Our beloved object of desire reveals the beauty we (as the self) long for as something we already carry, but is projected externally in the other.
Through love’s mirror, we rediscover aspects of ourselves that have been exiled to the shadow (because we can only see as a reflection). When understood symbolically, relationships cease to be transactions of need and become mirrors of becoming.
The beloved is not a possession; they are a reflection of the soul’s own courage to love in another what cannot see in the self.
The Alchemy of Light and Darkness
Astrologically, the current sky offers a vivid metaphor.
The Sun’s passage through Scorpio — now in tension with Pluto in Aquarius, dramatizes the same archetypal movement: light meeting its shadow.
In this cosmic dialogue, the Sun represents consciousness, the clear principle of essence; Pluto, the invisible depth that governs death and rebirth. Their square is not a conflict to avoid but an initiation to endure.
It asks us to let illumination penetrate the dark, to let awareness enter the places that reason alone cannot reach. This is the essence of the wisdom of darkness:
Light becomes conscious when it learns to see in the dark.
The descent into shadow is how consciousness becomes embodied. The archetypal friction between Sun and Pluto mirrors our own inner work, the breaking open of self-images that can no longer contain our soul’s expansion.
Myth as a Framework for Meaning
When we see our lives mythically, events stop appearing as random accidents and begin to reveal symbolic coherence.
The psyche communicates through images, metaphors, and patterns, and mythology gives us a language to read them.
To live mythically is to shift from asking “Why is this happening to me?” to “What archetype is moving through me?”
It invites curiosity instead of control, participation instead of resistance. In a world often flattened by logic and speed, myth restores depth. It re-enchants the ordinary life with significance. The breakup becomes a descent; the creative impulse becomes a visit from the muse; the confusion becomes a rite of passage.
And in Doing So, The Observer Awakens
Ultimately, myth trains us to witness ourselves as part of a living cosmos. Because our human reality is constrained and constructed by our psyches, which inherit a primal development of our brain’s cognitive capacity.
The psyche and the heavens are not separate domains but mirrors of one another — as the ancients said, as above, so within.
When we adopt this perspective, even pain acquires purpose. And when our brains find meaning, we feel like we can endure the adversities of life.
Through this lens, darkness becomes a womb rather than a void. Faith shifts from belief in an outcome to trust in the uncertainties of the process that is both psychological and cosmological.
To live through the eyes of myth is to remember that the universe speaks in symbols, and we are one of them.
Closing Reflection
Meaning is not given; it is perceived. And perception ripens when we learn to see symbolically.
The Sun may descend into Scorpio’s night, but it does not lose its light ; it learns to illuminate from within.
Likewise, the human spirit is not destroyed by descent; it is deepened by it.
When we stop resisting the dark, we begin to participate in the ancient rhythm that births consciousness itself.
To live mythically is to say yes to that rhythm, to recognize that the cracks in our stories are how the light of wisdom enters.
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Written by Rosi Rodrigues
Entrepreneur, writer, and symbolic language researcher exploring the intersection of myth, psyche, and embodiment. Through her project Nocturna, she studies dreams and archetypes as living dialogues between the body and the cosmos.