2.9 Mythological aspects

The Sacred Voyage: a holotropic perspective on mental health

In different types of shamanism it is assumed that traumatic experiences cause parts of the soul to be split off. When this happens, these parts of the soul are assumed to end up in what is known as the Underworld, or in an alternative parallel reality such as the Upperworld. Unlike conventional Western methods, which remain at the surface of people’s consciousness, shamans have been practicing tried and proven methods for thousands of years, to descend or ascend into these worlds in order to retrieve the lost parts of the soul. The techniques applied for this goal are known as methods of soul retrieval.

In shamanism it is common for the shaman to retrieve the lost parts of his client’s soul. The approach of the Sacred Voyage is to teach people to find and retrieve the traumatized parts of their soul themselves, without the mediation of a shaman or healer. This is a theme described by mythologist Joseph Campbell as the ‘hero’s journey’.

‘The hero’s first task is to retreat from the earthly stage of secondary consequences and travel to those areas of the psyche in which problems originate, where the difficulties are truly situated, and destroy them, fighting the childhood demons of his local culture and struggling towards real, undistorted experience to deal with what Jung has dubbed the ‘archetypical images’.’ (Joseph Campbell)

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