In the grand tapestry of human mythology, the hero’s journey is often depicted as an outward conquest – the slaying of the dragon, the rescue of the maiden, the seizing of the golden artefact. But there is a second, more perilous journey that begins when the external world ceases to provide a mirror to your own depths, and you feel yourself washed up into the shallows of a life that feels distant and unsatisfying. Whether or not we unconsciously stage our own drama to find the yearned-for depth we have lost, we nonetheless dive into those depths when we cannot face another day of insipid routine. This is the journey into the “Night Sea,” described in many ancient cultures and traditions, a descent into the silence where the social self dissolves and the fundamental architecture of the soul is washed newly clean. And what was dull becomes iridescent and sparkling, as it is given vitality by the waters.
To understand the “Night Sea” one must look beyond the individual life to the great river of human inheritance – to a lineage of wisdom that stretches from the sun-stark temples of the Nile to the quiet consulting rooms of Zurich. This is the Nekyia, a term the Greeks used for a “descent into the underworld,” and its provenance is as old as the human spirit’s first encounter with the dark.
In the mythology of Ancient Egypt, the sun god Ra provided the primal blueprint for this mystery. Each evening, the solar bark did not simply vanish; it entered the Duat, the underworld, where Ra had to navigate a perilous subterranean river. This was the “Solar Path” through the night, where the god faced the serpent Apophis in the absolute blackness. Ra, in his sacred daily circumnavigation, could only be reborn at the horizon of dawn by overcoming this formidable obstacle each and every day. Apophis has sparked in my awareness – as the asteroid set to pass perilously close to Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029. The universe often speaks most fluently through synchronicity. Apophis carries the symbolism of fire, darkness, and ruin – an outcome that would define its legacy were the 2.7% impact probability cited by astronomers to be realised in three years’ time.
In a different strand, retelling the same mythical story, in the ancient sands of Mesopotamia, the hero Gilgamesh and others sought the “Land of No Return,” confronting figures like Huwawa – the guardian of the Cedar Forest – who represents the terrifying, skeletal power of nature that stands at the edge of the ego’s kingdom.
In our own era, these ancient symbols were revitalised by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, who recognised that these myths were not merely stories of the past, but maps of the internal world. Campbell identified this diving for richness and meaning as the “Belly of the Whale,” drawing on the story of Jonah to describe that moment when the hero is swallowed by the unknown. It is a state of metamorphosis, where the old self is digested so that a new, more universal being can be born.
Jung, the great explorer of the collective unconscious, formalised this as a psychological necessity. He argued that when our social structures and external witnesses – what we might call the “Father-given world” – fail to support our growth, the psyche undergoes a Night Sea journey of its own. We sink into the unconscious to recover the lost gold of our authentic nature. It need not, though, be a sea; it might be a pond, a well, or any primordial, untamed, or menacing waters that represent uncertainty, wildness, and emotional depths; of our fears and terrors unknown. Theseus dived into the sea to retrieve the ring of Minos, Sedna was cast into the sea and emerged transformed, and the Frog Prince retrieved the golden ball; these proto-myths and fairy tales echo the act of baptism, in which we are transformed and made whole by sacred waters.
The dynamics of this transformation are precisely what we find in the lonely precincts of Orcus. His baptism is of a different order from the civilised day-lit world and operates toward a deeper, more demanding truth. When we find ourselves unwelcome in, or at odds with, the societies of men, we are being called to follow the solar path of Ra – to travel through the darkness where no one can see us, not to be lost, but to find the internal light that does not depend on the sun. We learn to illuminate our own path. This is the ultimate provenance of the outcast: it is the sacred space where the hero, having survived the whale or other dread guardian, realises that his own sovereignty is the only witness he truly requires.
To understand this journey, we must look to the symbols etched into the celestial sphere. Orcus, a frozen, unlit wanderer in the immense dark of eternity, carries in his wake the weight of an ancient, inexorable law. In the language of the sky, Orcus is the “Lord of the Oath,” the one who guards the treasures of the non-negotiable. His presence, whether inflicted upon or invited into a life story, signals a transition from the world of masks to the world of bones.
The Call to the Depths
These private journeys often begin with a dream – a message from the “Eternal Woods” of the psyche. My dream woke me terrified and trembling on October 12th, 2010. I know the date because I was so unsettled by the imagery, I wrote it down. Imagine a forest, but not one of green life, not an ancient Lebanese cedar forest of the days of Gilgamesh, but a forest of shattered trees, petrified into black glass. The ground is a jagged mosaic of obsidian shards, reflecting a brooding, low-hanging sky.
In this ruined forest, I realised I was being hunted, my pursuer no common predator, but a skeletal giant, jointed in heavy bone, with skin like desiccated parchment. It had a single, baleful eye that fixed upon me with absolute recognition. This terrifying apparition, I now know, was Orcus, the “God of the Deep Pit,” and the symbol of an inevitable reckoning.
Carl Jung said that “Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” And so it proved. My dream came at the exact moment that the transiting Plutino Orcus was conjunct my natal Jupiter – and the magnifying effect of the bountiful Olympian revealed Orcus to me. I began to research this grim entity that very day and published the first astrological treatise on Orcus a few days after the fifth and final pass, nearly two years later in the summer of 2012. Orcus had woken me up from my lifelong sleep, had reminded me that a life without sanctity is meaningless, and he took me with him into the terrifying deep.
The Airless Chamber
For many of us, our homes – our lives, with all their careful structures of work, family, and standing – slowly close around us. Not quite a tomb, but something just as quiet: an anchorite’s cell, a hermit’s cave, but without the sanctity. There are days when nothing stirs, nothing surprises. The air does not move.
And yet, it is not always so. We remember – vividly – the bright intervals: the laughter of a young family, the scent of fresh bread, kisses in the rain, bluebells trembling in a secret wood. But life has its ebb. There come seasons when the current slackens, when something in us dims. The rooms remain comfortable, but they grow airless. We live on repetitions; recycled thoughts, borrowed affirmations, familiar routines, and hopes for tomorrow that feel increasingly smothering. And then, almost without warning, a restlessness. We have forgotten to look for the signs, and we become hopeless and lost.
Please understand if you are feeling this – there are no coincidences! If you are living life with even the tiniest synchronicity unremarked, you are letting the fairy dust fall from your fingers, to be trod into the barren ground. In January 2020, I set out to escape the hearth as Icarus crowded upon Vesta in a symbolic meeting 20 years in the making. And perhaps I might have passed this opportunity by, but then Saturn squared Vesta and the hearth fire went out. So, I dived again into the Night Sea. I stepped out of the door with no particular objective or destination. I only knew that I was sick and needed to be elsewhere. It was an inner pulling. Perhaps not a commandment from God of the type that forced Abraham to leave his homeland or Moses to lead his people into the wilderness, but there are traditions that are embedded in the mythical scaffolding of our beliefs and stories, reflecting profound truths that we ignore to our peril. Siddhartha knew that while he was surrounded by comforts and the trappings of affluence and ease, he would never grow in wisdom or find peace. The Tibetan Yogi, Milarepa, after raining curses upon his family, wandered the wilderness to seek redemption, realising that no true atonement could occur while he stayed among people. Herbert Mason, commenting on his study of Gilgamesh remarked: “What we finally do, out of desperation … is go on an impossible, or even forbidden, journey or pilgrimage, which from a rational point of view is futile: to find … the secret of eternal life or the secret of adjusting to this life as best we can.” This peregrination takes the seeker into the long, empty distances – across coasts and through the desolate fields of the world. At first, this solitude feels like the ecstasy of freedom. But solitude is a trickster. It is not an empty space; it is an exacting witness and it requires that you see yourself without the distorting glamour of reflected approval and the mandate inferred from belonging.
This is what I do, what I have always done. When the room becomes airless, I go out, and I lose myself in the remote places and wrestle with demons. Great silences are unlovely movers of the depths; they crush you with the cramped reflection of your own smallness, and in a miserable exchange they offer you up only hurts and grievances. But sit long enough with them, and they bring gifts. Some of those gifts are beautiful, made of gratitude, like the ease of home, or the love of family, or the comfort of an easy chair and a soft bed. Other gifts are uglier and less easy to treasure, for they are revealed by waters that wash away old hurts. Some are almost not gifts at all, for there are traumas in every human heart that cannot be easily washed clean. They are deep, hurting places in the very well of the heart that you cannot ease. But under the ministrations of silence, they bring a renunciation of sorrow, which is a blessing far beyond the neurosis of their abandonment.
But this transforming work can only take place in solitude. Without the distraction of life’s infinite audience, the mind begins an involuntary inventory. In the silence of the bleak places, the ego’s petty grievances surface first – the stings of minor betrayals and old irritations. Yet these are merely the crunching leaves on the forest floor. Beneath them lies the heavy timber of the earth, the knotty material, the redolent half-subsumed matter of the restless psyche, not quite buried, not quite alive.
The Sovereignty of the Unseen
It is here, in the absolute isolation of the fields and skies, that the “Orcus Question” emerges. It is a question that cuts through the social fabric, the façade of acceptance that we carefully construct, like an obsidian shard slices the soft flesh of the foot: If no one sees me, who am I? In our modern world, we seek to address a profound inferiority complex (as Alfred Adler described it) by seeking the affirmation of the group. We believe that if we are seen, we exist. If we are accepted, we are valid. But Orcus reveals the bankruptcy of this belief. Orcus reveals that any self that requires an audience to exist is, by definition, a false self.
It is a dilemma as old as time, as Marcus Aurelius said it two thousand years ago, “I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.“ How can you form a meaningful or even valid opinion of who you are if you spend no time with yourself? It cannot be done, for you and your soul are strangers.
Orcus does not impose isolation as a punishment; he reveals what isolation exposes. He binds us not to society’s view of us, not to the opinions of family, friends, and vague acquaintances, but to the non-negotiable. If there is nothing within us that we hold as sacred, Orcus has nothing to bind. We simply dissipate into the prejudices of the masses. But if there is a core in you – a diamond truth – then it must be upheld without witness, without reward, and without approval.
The Oath of Bones
The threshold of Orcus is the end of the appeal. In the civil world, we appeal to the law, to the sympathy or the common sense of our neighbours. But in the underworld, there is no one left to appeal to. You are the judge, the jury, and, if you don’t do the hard spiritual work, the prisoner of your own ambivalence.
Any seeker of the Night Sea will tell the same story. Depth is not easy. There are no twinkly lights down there, no positive affirmations. This is an iron realm with only iron promises. But the work has a hard beauty, for it is the hours at the anvil that puts the mettle in the blade, that puts the relentless strength of Hephaistos into your arm. Those difficult labours brighten the forge fire enough that, one day, when you lower the bucket into the depths to replenish the water, you glimpse the Hairy Man at the bottom of the well – the authentic, wild self – that does not need permission to exist. But, to see him, we must be willing to be outcast and alone, for we cannot have company at the forge. Only then is our oath is fully made. Then we can say, This is true. This I will not betray.
This commitment does not depend on being understood. It is a hammer to the soul – a focused, directed force that does not care for the opinion of the crowd. It is the sovereignty of one who walked the obsidian forest and survived.
When the cycle completes and beneficent Jove returns to the shadowed court of Orcus once again, the dream repeats. But the second time, the fear is different. It is no longer the fear of being caught, but the recognition of the end.
The end of what? The end of the little narcissist, the end of the gaslit child, the end of the sad little victim, the end of that version of yourself that would trade its authenticity for a seat at the table.
The Gift
“The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.“ – Romans 13:12
That apotheosis of the socially outcast, D.H. Lawrence said “Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.” Orcus is the brook that sings to the night. It is the song that continues even when there is no one to hear it, indeed, a song that is only audible in the silence. It is the commitment to the inviolable. This is the only path to authentic connection – not a connection based on a craving for validation, but a connection you have forged with your authentic self, which can never be broken.
In my last essay, I explained that we stand at the threshold of this new Neptune-Aries era, where the “Mist of Illusion” (Neptune) is meeting the “Fire of Initiation” (Aries), and that the hard lessons of Orcus are our only salvation. The world will try to pull us back into mass prejudice and ideological contagion. It will offer us new identities to wear, new groups to belong to, and new witnesses to satisfy our need for approval and acceptance.
But once you are initiated into Orcus, you will know better. Though his mentorship is harsh and unappealing, it will give you the gift of a diamond truth, flashing and unassailable.
The skeletal giant in the dream – with his single, baleful eye – is not a monster. He is an incarnation of the absolute. He is the symbol of undilute sincerity. He sees only what is real. He ignores the trinkets, the clothes, the titles, the grievances, and the excuses.
He sees only the bone of you.
To be caught by him is the greatest grace a seeker can receive. It is the end of the self as performance. It is the moment you stop waiting for the audience to clap and you start walking because your own feet know the rhythm of the obsidian shards.
In the end, Orcus asks us to define ourselves without appeal to those who rejected us or even those who tolerate us. He asks us to form a commitment that does not depend on being accepted. He asks us to stand alone and say:
This is true.
This I will never betray.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this treatise on the tenets of Orcus, please consider buying my book.
