Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, something weird happened.
Jesus died. That much everyone agrees on. He hung on a cross, gave up the ghost, got taken down and buried in a tomb. Dead guy. Done deal.
Except... where did he go for those three days?
The Apostles' Creed (which billions of Christians recite without thinking about what they're actually saying) contains this bizarre line: "He descended into hell."
Wait, what? Jesus went to hell?
Yeah. And what he did there is one of the most psychologically profound, shamanic, and utterly overlooked stories in Christian mythology. It's called the Harrowing of Hell, and if you understand it properly, it's not about Jesus rescuing souls from eternal damnation. It's a map for descending into your own underworld and bringing back the parts of yourself you've left for dead.
The Story Nobody Talks About
Here's the tale that got quietly shuffled to the margins of official Christianity:
After the crucifixion, Christ descends into Sheol (the Hebrew underworld) or Hades (the Greek version). This isn't the fire-and-brimstone hell of medieval imagination. This is the realm of the dead. The place where souls wait. The shadowy kingdom beneath consciousness.
Christ doesn't sneak in. He kicks down the gates. Medieval art shows him literally trampling broken doors and chains, hauling Adam and Eve (and a whole crowd of Old Testament figures) out of their prison. He invades death's territory, binds the powers that hold souls captive, and leads a liberation march back to the land of the living.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition celebrates this as the central meaning of Easter, way more important than the empty tomb. Their icon of the resurrection shows Christ standing on broken gates in the shape of a cross, pulling Adam and Eve up from their tombs. The resurrection isn't about Jesus coming back. It's about Jesus going down to get everyone else.
This is a psychopomp story. A guide-of-souls story. A shamanic descent narrative.
And if you read it as psychology instead of theology, it becomes a manual for shadow work.
Psychopomp 101: What Even Is That?
A psychopomp is a guide of souls. Someone (or something) that travels between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The boundary-crosser. The one who knows the way through the underworld and can bring things back.
Every mythology has them. Hermes guides souls to Hades. Anubis weighs hearts and leads the dead through the Duat. Odin hangs on Yggdrasil and learns the runes from the depths. The shaman journeys to the lower world to retrieve lost soul fragments.
The role of the psychopomp is always the same: go down, face what's down there, bring something back. Usually that something is a part of the self that got lost, trapped, or left behind.
Christ as psychopomp does exactly this. He goes into the realm of death (the unconscious, the shadow, the underworld of the psyche) and liberates what's been imprisoned there. He doesn't destroy death. He descends into it, opens it from the inside, and leads captives out.
Sound familiar? That's every hero's journey. That's every successful therapy session. That's every deep shadow work process where you finally reclaim a piece of yourself you thought was gone forever.
The Shamanic Descent Pattern
Shamanic cultures worldwide have a consistent pattern for initiatory experiences. The shaman-to-be has a crisis (illness, vision, psychological breakdown), descends into the underworld or the realm of spirits, faces death or dismemberment, receives power or knowledge from the spirits of that realm, and returns transformed with the ability to heal others.
The Harrowing of Hell follows this pattern exactly.
The crisis: Jesus is betrayed, tortured, abandoned by his followers, and executed. Total ego death. Everything he built is destroyed. His mission appears to have failed.
The descent: He enters Sheol, the land of the dead. He goes where no living person can follow. He crosses the ultimate boundary.
The confrontation: He faces the powers of death and Satan (depending on which version you read). He doesn't negotiate. He overpowers them.
The retrieval: He brings captive souls back with him. Not just any souls, but the ones who'd been waiting since the beginning. Adam and Eve. The patriarchs and prophets. All the dead who'd been held in the underworld, unable to move forward.
The return and transformation: He rises on the third day, not as the same person who died, but as something more. He can pass through locked doors. He's hard to recognize. He's both physical and not. He's integrated death and come back changed.
This isn't theology. This is the universal pattern of transformation through descent.
What the Hell Is Hell, Anyway?
Let's be clear: the "hell" Christ descends into isn't the firepit from medieval sermons. The original word is Sheol (Hebrew) or Hades (Greek). Both mean the same thing: the underworld. The place beneath. The realm of shades and shadows. The land of the dead.
Psychologically, this is your unconscious. Your shadow. The parts of your psyche you've repressed, denied, split off, or simply forgotten. The place where exiled pieces of yourself wait in darkness, unable to move forward, unable to die properly, just... stuck.
Everyone has an underworld. You built it yourself. Every time you said "that's not me," you sent something down there. Every time you were told "good kids don't feel that," part of you went into the shadows. Every time you experienced trauma and dissociated, a fragment of consciousness got trapped below.
Your underworld is full of ghosts. Parts of yourself that used to be alive but got buried. The angry child who wasn't allowed to express rage. The creative self who was mocked into silence. The sexual being who was shamed. The grief that never got processed. The dreams you abandoned.
These aren't metaphors. In the geography of the psyche, there really are trapped, frozen, waiting parts of you in the depths. Shadow work is descending to get them.
The Descent You Have to Make
Here's where the Christ story becomes personally relevant:
Nobody else can harrow your hell for you.
Christ didn't send angels to liberate the underworld. He went himself. Fully. Completely. Into death. That's the point. The psychopomp has to make the actual journey.
Your therapist can't descend into your shadow for you. Your guru can't retrieve your lost soul parts. Your self-help books can't break the gates of your inner hell. You have to go down there yourself.
The good news? You already know the way. You've been there before. Every nightmare is a glimpse of your underworld. Every panic attack is the underworld pushing up into ordinary consciousness. Every depression is a failed descent where you got stuck halfway down.
The harrowing isn't about avoiding the underworld. It's about going down intentionally, with full consciousness, and bringing back what's been trapped.
How the Harrowing Actually Works (Psychologically)
Let's break down the mechanics.
Step one: Ego death is required. Christ didn't descend as the triumphant miracle-worker. He descended as a broken, executed criminal. Everything that made him "Jesus the Messiah" was stripped away on the cross. He went down naked, powerless, dead.
Your ego has to die (at least temporarily) before you can do real shadow work. As long as you're defending your self-image, maintaining your persona, protecting your identity, you can't descend. The gates won't open. You need the humility of death to enter the underworld.
Step two: You face what's down there. The harrowing involves confronting Death and Satan, the rulers of the underworld. These aren't external beings. They're the forces that keep your shadow material imprisoned.
Death (in this context) is the part of you that would rather stay unconscious, stay numb, stay safe. It's the resistance to life, the pull toward stasis. Satan (which just means "the accuser" or "the adversary") is your inner critic, the superego, the internalized voice that judges and condemns parts of yourself into exile.
You have to face these forces. Not fight them (though that's what the myth says), but face them. Recognize them. See how they operate. Understand that they've been keeping you fragmented.
Step three: You reclaim what was lost. This is the actual harrowing. Christ breaks open the gates, shatters the chains, and leads captives to freedom.
Practically, this means: you find the exiled parts of yourself, you acknowledge them, you welcome them back. The rage you buried? You let it live again. The joy you shut down? You give it permission. The creativity you abandoned? You integrate it back into conscious life.
This isn't easy. These parts were exiled for reasons. They might be scary. They might disrupt your comfortable self-concept. They might demand changes to your life. But they're yours. And they're needed.
Step four: You return transformed. The resurrection isn't separate from the descent. They're one movement. You can't rise without first descending. And when you come back, you're different.
Christ after the resurrection isn't the same as Christ before the crucifixion. He's integrated death. He's moved through the underworld and back. He's whole in a way that includes both life and death, light and shadow, heaven and hell.
That's what successful shadow integration looks like. You're still you, but you're more you. You have access to parts of yourself that were locked away. You're less fragmented. You can hold paradox without splitting. You're more alive because you've befriended death.
The Part Where You Actually Do This
Theory is nice. Here's practice.
You already make descents. Every major life transition involves one. Every breakdown. Every dark night of the soul. Every time life falls apart and you're forced to let go of who you thought you were.
The question is: are you making them consciously, or are you just getting dragged down and hoping to survive?
Conscious descent means:
Recognizing when you're being called down. Depression isn't always pathology. Sometimes it's an invitation to descend. Anxiety isn't always disorder. Sometimes it's your psyche screaming that shadow material needs attention. The compulsive behavior, the repeated pattern, the dream that won't leave you alone... these are all signals that something in your underworld needs liberation.
Choosing to go willingly. You can be dragged into the underworld by circumstance (crisis, trauma, breakdown), or you can enter intentionally through practice. Meditation, active imagination, dream work, psychedelic journeys, ritual, and therapy with someone who understands depth psychology all open the gates.
The harrowing requires intention. Christ didn't accidentally end up in hell. He went on purpose.
Doing the actual work down there. Once you're in the underworld of your psyche, you have to engage. That means feeling what you've been avoiding. Remembering what you've repressed. Facing the parts of yourself you've condemned. Having the conversations with your younger selves that never happened. Giving voice to what was silenced.
This is where most people bail. The descent is uncomfortable. It brings up material that your whole personality structure was built to keep down. But backing out halfway leaves you stuck. You have to go all the way down, do the work, and bring something back.
Integrating what you retrieve. You can't just have a cathartic experience in your shadow and then go back to life as usual. Integration is the point. The parts you liberate need space in your actual life. That might mean changing behaviors. Ending relationships that require you to stay small. Speaking truths you've been silent about. Living more authentically even when it's inconvenient.
Christ brought the liberated souls back with him. You have to bring your retrieved shadow material back into the light of consciousness and let it live there.
Why Christianity Forgot Its Own Best Story
Here's the weird part: Western Christianity mostly ignores the Harrowing of Hell. It's in the Apostles' Creed, but nobody talks about it. Easter is about the empty tomb and the risen Christ, not about the three-day underworld journey.
Why?
Because the institutional church has always been terrified of the psychopomp function. If people can descend into their own depths and retrieve their own soul parts, they don't need priests. If Christ modeled the shamanic journey, then everyone can make that journey. That's too democratic. Too experiential. Too uncontrollable.
So the church emphasized Jesus as unique savior (only he can save you) and downplayed Jesus as psychopomp guide (he shows you how to save yourself by descending and retrieving what's lost). The harrowing became a weird theological footnote instead of the central transformative teaching.
But the Eastern Orthodox tradition kept it alive. Their theology is explicitly about "theosis," becoming God-like through participating in Christ's descent and return. Their mysticism is initiatory. They understand that the pattern matters more than the historical event.
The pattern is: descent, death, liberation, return, transformation. That's the path. Christ didn't do it so you wouldn't have to. He did it to show you how.
The Liberating Heresy
Here's what makes this reading of the Harrowing dangerous to orthodoxy but liberating to individual practice:
If Christ is psychopomp, then the resurrection isn't about what happened to one man 2,000 years ago. It's about a process available to everyone. The descent into death (ego death, shadow encounter, dissolution of identity) and the return with integrated wholeness is the pattern of transformation itself.
You don't worship this. You do it.
Every mystic who's worth reading understood this. John of the Cross and his dark night of the soul. Teresa of Avila and her interior castle with its deepest, darkest room. Julian of Norwich and her showings that came through illness and near-death. Meister Eckhart and his insistence that God is born in the soul's ground.
They all made the descent. They all harrowed their own hells. They all came back transformed. And the church condemned most of them for it, or at least kept them at arm's length, because they were too direct, too experiential, too shamanic.
The joke is, they were just following the pattern Christ laid out. They were taking the harrowing seriously.
Your Underworld Is Waiting
You have ghosts down there. Parts of yourself that have been waiting since childhood, or since your last major trauma, or since the moment you decided certain things about yourself weren't acceptable. They're not demons. They're not sins. They're you.
And they can't liberate themselves. They need someone to come down, break open the gates, acknowledge them, and lead them back to conscious life. That someone is you. You're both the lost soul and the psychopomp. You're both Adam in the tomb and Christ kicking down the door.
The harrowing isn't a one-time event. It's a practice. A pattern you'll repeat at every major threshold of your life. Each descent goes deeper. Each return brings more of yourself back online. Each integration makes you more whole.
The gate to your underworld is closer than you think. It's in the feeling you've been avoiding. The dream that disturbs you. The pattern you can't break. The grief you haven't processed. The rage you've been suppressing. The shame that keeps you small.
Pick one. Just one piece of shadow material. Make the descent. Do the harrowing. Bring it back.
Christ spent three days down there. Your descents might be shorter (a meditation session, a therapy hour) or longer (months of depression, years of addiction recovery). The timeline doesn't matter. The willingness to go down and the commitment to bring something back is what counts.
Hell is real. It's inside you. And nobody's coming to save you from it except the you who's willing to descend, face what's there, and liberate what's been trapped.
That's the harrowing. That's the psychopomp path. That's the resurrection that actually matters.
Now go down and get your ghosts. They've been waiting long enough.
This article is part of our Theology collection. Read our comprehensive Gnostic Christianity guide to explore the ancient wisdom and mystical power of spiritual traditions.
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